12 IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. 



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 havoc might he not 

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

 and yet with all these appearances, and much of vulgar pre- 

 judice against him, it may fairly be questioned whether he is 

 at all inj urious ; 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 motives of mischief 

 nor amusement that he slices off the bark, or digs his way 

 into the trunk. — For the sound and healthy tree is the least 

 object of his attention. The diseased, infested with insects, 

 and hastening to putrefaction, are Ms favourites ; there the 

 deadly crawling enemy have formed a lodgement between the 

 bark and tender wood, to drink up the very vital part 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 believed that the 

 larvas 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 Charlestown, 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 pre- 

 judice stubbornly persist in directing their indignation against 

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

 very vermin; as if the hand that probed the wound to extract 

 its cause, should be equally detested with that which inflicted 



