OF THE UNITED STATES 273 



small larvae that I had concealed in the interstices for him. This 

 would not do, for I had not a particularly good light to work in, 

 and I was using a small " stop," so as to obtain all the detail pos- 

 sible. In order, then, to check his movements a little, it occurred 

 to me to bring his perch to the vertical position. This seemed to 

 make but very little difference to him at first, and he ran up and 

 down the limb and peeped about it, first upon one side, and then 

 upon the other, in a manner most interesting to behold. Several 

 exposures were made upon him, and immediately developed in 

 the dark room near by, but from one cause or another they were 

 not fully satisfactory. At last, however, I got him. He had been 

 playing at hide and seek with me all around his stump, and I 

 had engaged with him at the same game behind the ground glass 

 at the back of my camera, when suddenly he stopped for a couple 

 of seconds, missing me as I hid my head beneath the focussing 

 cloth. The opportunity was too good to be lost, and I squeezed 

 the bulb as long as I dared, and then let go, and the snap of the 

 shutter informed me that he was my woodpecker — at last. 



The reproduction of this picture is offered here as an illustra- 

 tion and is shown in Fig. 65. It is one of the best photo- 

 graphs of a living woodpecker that I have thus far met with, in- 

 asmuch as it is over two-thirds the size of life; sharp to a fault, 

 and exhibits the bird in a very characteristic attitude. It prac- 

 tically consumed an entire day to obtain this picture, and fre- 

 quently I have spent a great deal more than that amount of time 

 in securing the result desired. In order to get even as simple 

 a picture as the one here given, it is absolutely necessary that 

 several things be taken into consideration. The operator must 

 possess an intimate knowledge of his subject in a state of nature; 

 he must have taste, and an enormous stock of patience; and 

 finally, in everything only the very best of material must be em- 

 ployed. 



Nestlings of a great many species of birds are, at their best, 

 very extraordinary looking objects, but of all these, young wood- 

 peckers are, I think, the most remarkable. 



Last May, nry son and myself were rambling through the woods 

 of the southern part of Montgomery county, Maryland, within 

 a few miles of Washington. Here, in a great, lofty stump of a 

 limb of an old tree, long dead, he discovered, twenty or more feet 

 above the ground, the entrance to a new nest of the Golden- 

 winged woodpecker (Colaptes auratus). As I was photograph- 



