16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



Throughout the wet, cold woods the ground was covered with 

 flights of the purple-pink butterfly-blossoms of the fringed 

 polygala, each flower set in the middle of a cluster of irregular 

 green leaves and flaring out into a pair of wide purple wings on 

 either side of a hollow-fringed tongue. The color seemed to me 

 to be almost identical with that of the calopogon. In one place 

 I found a late spray of pure white trailing arbutus and farther 

 along saw a fire-red salamander wreathed around a purple-pink 

 polygala, the exact color-combination that I once saw on a 

 friend's lawn where a Japanese quince blossomed next to a 

 Judas bush. 



Finally we reached the valley ringed around on every side by 

 mountains and followed a fire line through the dripping spring 

 woods. As we neared a live chestnut-oak tree with a dead heart 

 where the ground was covered with large chips for a space of 

 some thirty feet, out from a bhole aout thirty-five feet from the 

 ground flapped a bird which seemed about the size of a crow 

 with black, white-lined wings. Ordinarily a female Pileated 

 Woodpecker will not leave her nest when she has eggs until the 

 tree is tapped. Before she has eggs she will leave the nest when 

 one is fifty yards away no matter how carefully the tree is ap- 

 proached. This nest went down nineteen inches, twenty inches 

 being the average depth. All around in the neighboring trees 

 were the square feeding-holes and numberless little testing holes 

 made by the birds in live trees and dead ones alike, where 

 they had explored to find if there was any trace of the larva 

 of the long-horned white-pine borer on which they feed ex- 

 tensively. The nesting-hole was round and seemed about twice 

 the size of that of a Flicker, being about three and one-half 

 inches in diameter. Harlow told me that the bird often makes 

 a number of trial nests before it finally carves out one to suit. 

 May 10 is the standard date for a full clutch of eggs although 

 the nest is frequently begun as early as March. 



The second nest was on another hillside in a dead pitch pine 

 some twenty-five feet up. The bird hardly ever uses the same 

 nest twice. Harlow states that this has never happened to his 

 knowledge but once. As we started toward the second nest we 

 could hear the dull, heavy thudding through the wet air of the 



