GREAT BLACK WOODPECKER. 133 



toes connected together at the base, the two posterior toes entirely free. Tail of 

 ten or twelve feathers, the outside one the shortest, the others more or less gra- 

 duated, the shafts strong, elastic, and pointed. 



THE subjects of the third division of the Insessores, or 

 Perching Birds, are the Scansores, or Climbers ; a division, 

 which, as its name implies, includes all those birds remark- 

 able for their power of climbing, to accomplish which most 

 of them have their toes arranged in pairs, or two op- 

 posed to two, but with some modifications, to be hereafter 

 described. In our British Birds eight genera, forming 

 three families, belong to the Scansores, commencing with 

 the Picidtf, or family of the Woodpeckers. 



The Great Black Woodpecker was added to the cata- 

 logue of British Birds on the authority of Dr. Latham, 

 who said he had been informed that it had occasionally 

 been seen in Devonshire and the southern parts of the king- 

 dom. Dr. Pulteney, in his Catalogue of the Birds of 

 Dorsetshire, notices the Great Black Woodpecker as hav- 

 ing been more than once killed in that county : one in 

 particular is said to have been shot in the nursery at Bland- 

 ford, and another at Whitchurch. Montagu, in his Sup- 

 plement, says, " Lord Stanley assures us that he shot a 

 Picus martins in Lancashire ; and we have heard that 

 another was shot in the winter of 1805 on the trunk of a 

 tree in Battersea Fields." The specimen of the Black 

 Woodpecker, formerly in the collection of Mr. Donovan, 

 who was well known to give very high prices for rare 

 British-killed birds, for his own use in his History of 

 British Ornithology, this example, was affirmed to have 

 been shot in this country. At the sale of Mr. Donovan^s 

 collection, this specimen was purchased by Earl Derby, 

 and is now at Knowsley. I have been told of two in- 

 stances of the Black Woodpecker having been killed in 



