The Arctic Three-toed Woodpecker 
Description. — Adult male: Upperparts glossy blue-black, duller on flight- 
feathers; primaries and outer secondaries with paired spots of white on edges of outer 
and inner webs; a squarish crown-patch of yellow (mustard-yellow, or light cadmium to 
orange); a transverse white cheek-stripe meeting fellow on forehead and cut off by 
black malar-stripe from white of throat and remaining underparts; sides and lining 
of wings heavily barred with black; three outer pairs of rectrices graduated, white on 
exposed (under) portions. Bill plumbeous slaty, the mandible lighter; feet and legs 
grayish dusky; iris reddish brown. Adult female: Like male, but without yellow 
crown-patch. Young male: Like adult male, but black of upperparts duller, white of 
underparts less pure, tinged more or less with dingy gray; barring of sides more blended; 
the yellow of crown-patch reduced, streaky. Young female: Like young male, but 
yellow of crown still further reduced, sometimes barely perceptible. Length of adult 
209.6-254 (8.25-10.00); wing 129.5 (5-io); tail 77.9 (3-07); bill 33 (1.30); tarsus 23 
(.905). Female slightly smaller. 
Recognition Marks. —Towhee to robin size; yellow crown-patch of male and 
young; upperparts nearly solid black, as compared with Dryobates group; throat white, 
as compared with Sphyrapicus group. 
Nesting. — Nest: According to Bendire, a hole in stump or stub, from 2f4 to 
8 feet above ground. Eggs: 4; glossy white. Av. size 24.4 x 18.3 (.96 x .72). Season: 
May 20-June 10; one brood. 
General Range. —Northern North America, resident in the Canadian zone, 
from southern Alaska, southern Mackenzie, and southern Ungava, south to heavily 
wooded portions of the northern New England States, Michigan, etc., and in the West 
to the Black Hills, Wyoming, and the central Sierra Nevada of California; casually 
south in winter. 
Distribution in California. —A rare and very local resident in the Boreal 
zone of the Sierra Nevada Mountains from Mt. Shasta south to the Tahoe region, and 
Big Trees, Calaveras County (Belding), and in the Warner Mountains. 
Authorities.—Cooper, Orn. Calif., 1870, p. 384 (Sierra Nevada); Bendire, Life 
Hist. N. Am. Birds, vol. ii., 1895, p. 74; Bangs , Auk, vol. xvii., 1900, p. 131 (syst.; 
nomencl.); McAtee, U. S. Dept. Agric., Biol. Surv. Bull., no. 37, 1912, p. 25 (food). 
BEYOND a perfunctory mention in bird-lists from the Tahoe region 
and isolated records from distant mountains, very little seems to be 
recorded in ornithological literature of the Arctic Three-toed Woodpecker 
as a resident of California. I have never seen the bird myself, though I 
have searched diligently for him in the Warner Mountains, on Shasta, 
and in various localities of the central southern Sierras. Those who 
speak familiarly (and vaguely), therefore, of this stranded Eskimo have 
my green-eyed regards. 
Picoides arcticus is one of a boreal quintette, contemporaries of the 
Ice Age, whose survival in the mountains of sunny California gives to 
this State one of its most piquant charms. No other state, we are told, 
presented such a motley of human survivals as did California at the advent 
of the white man. And surely no other state of the American Union can 
present a gamut of bird life which runs from the tropical splendors of 
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