IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. 273 
seems to have designed him a_distinguished characteristic m the su- 
perb carmine crest and bill of polished ivory with which she has 
ornamented him, His eye is brilliant and daring ; and his whole 
frame so admirably adapted for his mode of life and method of procur- 
ing subsistence, as to impress on the mind of the examiner the most 
reverential ideas of the Creator. His manners have also a dignity in 
them superior to the common herd of Woodpeckers. Trees, shrub- 
bery, orchards, rails, fence-posts, and old, prostrate logs, are alike 
interesting to those, in their humble and indefatigable search for prey ; 
but the royal hunter now before us scorns the humility of such situa- 
tions, and seeks the most towering trees of the forests; seeming par- 
ticularly attached to those prodigious cypress swamps, whose crowded 
giant sons stretch their bare and blasted or moss-hung arms midway 
to the skies. In these almost inaccessible recesses, amid ruinous piles 
of impending timber, his trumpet-like note and loud strokes resound 
through the solitary, savage wilds, of which he seems the sole lord and 
inhabitant. Wherever he frequents, he leaves numerous monuments 
of his industry behind him. Wethere see enormous pine-trees, with 
cartloads of bark lying around their roots, and chips of the trunk itself, 
in such quantities as to suggest the idea that half a dozen of axe-men 
had been at.work there for the whole morning. The body of the tree 
is also disfigured with such numerous and so large excavations, that 
one can hardly conceive it possible for the whole to be the work of a 
Woodpecker. With such strength, and an apparatus so powerful, 
what havock might he not commit, if numerous, on the most useful of 
our forest-trees! And yet, with all these appearances, and much of 
eomy ead, retired, has given rise to the opinion, entertained by many, that the life 
of the Woodpecker was hard and laborious, dragged on in the same unvaried tract 
for one purpose, —the supply of food. It has been painted in vivid’ and imaginary 
coloring, and its existence has been described to be painful and burdensome in the 
extreme ; its cries have been converted into complaints, and its search for food into 
exertions of no use. We cannot agree to this. The ery of the Woodpecker is 
wild, and no doubt the incessant hewing of holes, without an adequate object, would 
be sufficiently miserable. These, however, are the pleasures of the bird. The 
knowledge to search after food is implanted in it, and organs most admirably 
formed to prevent exhaustion’ and insure success, have been granted to it. Its 
cries, though melancholy to us, are so from association with the dark forests and 
the stillness. which surrounds their haunts, but perhaps, at the time when we judge, 
are expressive of the greatest enjoyment. An answer of kindness in realy toa 
mate, the calling together of the newly-fledged brood, or exultation over the dis- 
covery of some favorite hoard of-food, are what are set down as painful: and 
discontented. . . - - 
Mr. Audubon’s remarks on this splendid species, “ the King of the Woodpeck- 
ers,” I have transcribed at some length, as indicating the particular manner of the 
typical family of this great group: — ‘ SN 
“The Ivory-billed ptoker ‘confines its rambles to a comparatively very 
small portion of the Unitéd States, it never having been Sigemed: in the Middle 
States within the baat of any person now living there. In fact, in no portion , 
a eu districts does the nature of the woods appear suitable to its remarkable 
abits. i "4 : : 
“Descending the Ohio, we meet with this splendid bird for the first time near the 
confluence of that beautiful river and the Mississippi ; after which, following the wind- 
ings of the latter, either downwards toward the sea, or upwards in the direction of the 
ssouri, we frequently observe it. On the Atlantic coast, North Carolina may be 
taken as the limit of its distribution, altheagh now and then an individual of the spe- 
