72 HOJtES WITHOUT HANDS. 



most picturesque trees. But, in point of fact, none of the British 

 Woodpeckers are able to cut so deep a tunnel into sound and 

 growing wood, and are perforce obliged to choose timber which 

 is already dead, and which has begun to decay. 



Sometimes the bird selects a spot where a branch has been 

 blown down, leaving a hollow in which the rain has lodged and 

 eaten its way deeply into the stem. In such places the wood is 

 so soft that it can be broken away with the fingers, or scraped 

 out with a stick ; and in many a noble tree, which seems to the 

 eye to be perfectly sound, the very heart-wood is being slowly 

 dissolved by the action of water, which has gained access through 

 some unsuspected hole. Water, when thus admitted to the 

 interior of a tree, fills its centre with decay ; and if a perforation 

 be made through the trunk, so as to let out the contained fiuid, 

 gallon after gallon of dark brown water wiU gush forth, mixed 

 with fragments of decayed wood, and betray, by its volume and 

 consistency, the extent of the damage which it has occasioned. 



Oftentimes a lai'ge fungus will start from a tree, and in some 

 mysterious manner will sap the life-power of the spot on which 

 it grows. When the fungus falls in the autumn, it leaves 

 scarcely a trace of its presence, the tree being apparently as 

 healthy as before the advent of the parasite. But the whole 

 character of the wood has been changed by the strange power of 

 the fungus, being soft and cork-like to the touch. Although the 

 eye of man cannot readily perceive the injury, the instinct of 

 the Woodpecker soon leads the bird to the spot, and it is in this 

 dead, soft, and spongy wood that the burrow is made. Mr. 

 Waterton, who, I believe, was the first to point out this fiict, has 

 shown me many examples of the fungus and its ravages among 

 the trees, several tine ash-trees and sycamores having been 

 reduced to mere stumps by the silent operation of the vegetable 

 parasite. 



It is, by the way, a rather remarkable fact, that a tree which 

 has been penetrated by water, can be relieved of its burden by 

 the hand of man. An auger, or long-shanked centre-bit, judi- 

 ciously inserted, will draw off the water, and if the aperture 

 through which it gained admission be carefully trimmed and 

 covered, so as to prevent any further lodgment of moisture, the 

 bark will roll over the orifice, and soon obliterate it. The same 

 process of sell'-ippnir will heal the smaller aperture made by the 



