The California Woodpecker 
holes with acorns. Speculation is still rife as to the cause or occasion 
or necessity or purpose of this strange practice, but the fact is indispu¬ 
table and the evidence of it widely diffused. Balanosphyra formicivorus 
bairdi has taken it for his life work to enshrine all the acorns, one by 
one, in appropriate wooden niches, so long as life shall last. This is his 
bounden duty, his meat and drink, his religion, and his destiny. 
What he accomplishes the photographs show well enough,—the close, 
methodical studding of bark or wood of any kind with acorns, chiefly 
those of live-oaks, over immense areas. The cultures, once started, 
are wrought upon continuously year by year, as material avails or the 
colony flourishes. Live-oaks themselves are the commonest hosts, 
together with the white, or post, oak, and the black oak of the southern 
counties. After these come sycamore and yellow pine or, more rarely, 
eucalyptus. Telegraph and telephone poles, gables, cornices, and, in 
fact, any wooden structure where they are permitted to work, if near 
the source of acorn supply, may come in for ornamentation. On a small 
square-sawed telephone pole near Marysville I found sixty acorns (and 
pecans purloined from a neighboring orchard) imbedded in a space five 
inches wide and two feet long. At that rate the pole carried some 1500 
of these tiny storehouses. 
In Tecolote Canyon, west of Santa Barbara, there is a giant syca¬ 
more which I count one of the handsomest examples of Carpintero’s 
workmanship,—an unbroken shaft, at least forty feet high and three 
feet across the inlaid face, covered with a “solid” mass of acorns totalling, 
say, some 20,000. Strawberry Valley in the San Jacinto Mountains 
appears to be a paradise for the California Woodpecker. Here majestic 
oaks (Quercus California!) alternate with still more majestic pines ( Pinus 
ponderosa), the former for sustenance and the latter for storage, and 
the doughty “California” is probably the most abundant bird in the 
valley. The boles of the most enormous pines are methodically riddled 
with their acorn-carrying niches, and in some of the trees the work is 
carried through from base to crown. In one such tree I estimated that 
there were imbedded no less than 50,000 acorns. 
Why does the bird do it? Ostensibly, of course, for food. Acorns 
form more than fifty per cent of this Woodpecker’s diet and by this 
provident arrangement the bird is able to regale itself on mast throughout 
the year. These treasure-houses are not “worm cultures” as was formerly 
supposed. Many of the acorns do become infected, but these represent, 
apparently, a dead loss to the bird. Care is taken, in selection, to pro¬ 
vide sound acorns, and one authority asserts, with what justice I do not 
know, that the birds are shrewd enough to select sweet ones out of the 
host of bitter acorns. Acorns so preserved keep sweet and usable much 
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