UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 327 



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 dreary wilds, of which he 

 seems the sole lord and inhabitant. Wherever he frequents he leaves 

 numerous monuments of his industry behind him. We there see 

 enormous pine trees with cart-loads 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 nume- 

 rous and so large excavations, that one can hardly conceive it possi- 

 ble lor the whole to be the work of a Woodpecker. With such 

 strength, and an apparatus so powerful, what havoc might he not 

 commit, if numerous, on the most useful of our forest trees 1 And 

 yet with all these appearances, and much of vulgar prejudice against 

 him, it may be fairly questioned whether he is at all injurious; or, at 

 least, whether his exertions do not contribute most powerfully to the 

 protection of our timber. Examine closely the tree where he has 

 been at work, and you will soon perceive, that it is neither from mo- 

 tives of mischief nor amusement that he slices off the bark, or digs 

 his way into the trunk. The sound and healthy tree is not the least 

 object of his attention : the diseased, infested with insects, and has- 

 tening to putrefaction, are his favourites; there the deadly crawling 

 enemy have formed a lodgement, between the bark and tender wood, 

 to drink up the very vital juice of the tree. It is the ravages of these 

 vermin which the intelligent proprietor of the forest deplores, as the 

 sole perpetrators of the destruction of his timber. Would it be be- 

 lieved that the larvae of an insect or fly, no larger than a grain of rice, 

 should silently, and in one season, destroy some thousand acres of 

 pine trees, many of them from two to three feet in diameter, and a 

 hundred and fifty feet high ! Yet whoever passes along the high road 

 from Georgetown to Charleston, in South Carolina, about twenty miles 

 from the former place, can have striking and melancholy proofs of this 

 fact. In some places the whole woods, as far as you can see around 

 you, are dead, stripped of the bark, their wintry-looking arms and 

 bare trunks bleaching in the sun, and tumbling in ruins before every 

 blast, presenting a frightful picture of desolation. And yet ignorance 

 and prejudice stubbornly persist in directing their indignation against 

 the bird now before us, the constant and mortal enemy of these very 

 rermin, as if the hand that probed the wound to extract its cause, 

 should be equally detested with that which inflicted it. Until some 

 effectual preventive, or more complete mode of destruction can be 

 devised against these insects and their larva, I would humbly suggest 

 the propriety of protecting, and receiving with proper feelings of 

 gratitude, the services of this and the whole tribe of Woodpeckers, 

 letting the odium of guilt fall to its proper owners. 



The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is not migratory ; he is seldom found 

 to the northward of Virginia; the Carolinas are his favourite states. 



Downy Woodpecker. This is the smallest of our Woodpeckers, 

 and is generally known by the appellation of the Safi-sucker. The 

 principal characteristics of this little bird are diligence, familiarity, 

 perseverance, and a strength and energy in the head and muscles of 

 the neck, which are truly astonishing. A serious charge has been 

 brought against him by the naturalists of Europe, viz. that he is al- 

 most constantly boring and digging into apple trees; and that he is 

 most destructive to the orchards of his whole genus. The first 



