THE GREEN WOOD-PECKER. 215 



them. This organ is extensible, barbed with reflected bristles, 

 and also supplied with a glutinous fluid at the tip, so that, 

 whenever it can reach the prey, it draws out the larger as 

 with a hook, and catches the smaller as with birdlime. The 

 surface insects it captures with the tongue only: and the 

 number of those that it does catch, and the rapidity with 

 which they are taken, are both truly wonderful. The number 

 of ants that inhabit forests, especially pine forests in dry^ 

 places, are very great; and these supply abundant food to 

 the wood-peckers, not only when the ants are hunting for 

 their prey on the trees, but when they are on the ground, 

 especially on those beaten paths which they form in the 

 neighbourhood of large ant-hills. 



The wood-pecker does not subsist wholly upon insects. 

 When the wood is ripening in the fall of the year, there is & 

 pause in nature generally; and during that pause, most of 

 the tree-eating insects are in the egg-state or gone. At that 

 time the wood-pecker follows the same law as all our locally- 

 resident birds that feed chiefly upon insects during the 

 summer, and betakes itself to vegetables to nuts, and other 

 farinaceous and oily endowed kernels, which the structure of 

 its bill enables it to get easily out of the toughest husks or the 

 hardest shells. 



In the miscellaneous plantations of the low country, the 

 wood-pecker is fond of particular trees the poplars, for 

 instance, are favourites, because they are easily bored on 

 account of their softness, and especially because they are 

 overrun with insects. It is also fond of oaks, because of the 

 natural holes that are in them, and the number of lepi- 

 dopterous larvae that are found about them. It is also fond 

 of trees that are apt to contain numerous aphides, not for 

 those creatures themselves, but for the ants which swarm 

 thickly about them. Wood-peckers afford striking proofs of 

 the effect which the quality of the soil has upon birds. 



