July,.1922 ACTIVITIES OF THE CALIFORNIA WOODPECKER 121 
not seem to belong to real play. Undoubtedly, the play of children and animals 
is often very strenuous and persistent. Nevertheless it has a sign of irrespon- 
sibility upon it that human harvesting and, so it seems to me, woodpecker har- 
vesting do not have. 
The quality in the woodpecker SOE which, as I imagine, reminded Hen- 
shaw of play is a certain indiscriminateness or ditfuseness of the activities. Cer- 
tainly there is no meagerness, no stinginess about them. But there is lots of un- 
certainty as to their direction and application. Consider the pecking, for ex- 
ample. The amount of unconcentrated effort that a bird makes as it runs about 
on the side of the tree trunk, or on the larger branches, delivering one or two 
whacks with its beak here, four or five there, in an old hole seemingly long sinee 
finished, or in no hole at all, makes an observer wonder whether any individual 
ever settles down to the task of drilling a complete hole, that is, of beginning the 
job and earrying it through to the end with no interruptions excepting such as 
may be imposed by the inherent limitations under which the work is done. And 
the observer is led thus to wonder even though birds are occasionally seen to 
peck in one spot for some minutes with only momentary cessation. 
I should say the performance resembles more that of young children when 
doing household tasks assigned them by their parents, than the play of such 
children. Dozens of the little side acts, as they may be called, which the birds 
do, remind one strongly of the momentary stopping of a small boy when running 
on a family errand, to pick up a stone and throw it, more or less aimlessly, at a 
telegraph pole or any other object that may happen to be near. 
At this point comes in a question of real interest raised by a cursory obser- 
vation. That question is, Do the birds really ‘‘stop to rest’’ once in a while in 
the course of their labors? The observation may be given by a transcription 
from my notes. | 
A curious incident this morning: A half-dozen or more birds busy on the job. At 
about 8:45 one noticed clinging to the under side of a dry limb, quite motionless. Re- 
mained in the same spot and position till 9 o’clock with only a slight movement of the 
head once in a while. During the fifteen minutes not a woodpecker was seen or heard 
around this tree. Then all, including the one watched, began to squawk, and fly around. 
Was this a rest period for all the birds in this group? 
Of course I was on the look-out for a recurrence of this the next morning. 
And sure enough, at 9 o’clock, a bird was discovered clinging to the under side 
of a much arched, dry top of a near-by black oak. And this individual remained 
quite as motionless as had the one watched on the previous morning, for ten min- 
utes after being discovered. However, there was not so complete a cessation of 
activity by the other birds as on the morning before. In this instance the quies- 
cent bird was near enough to enable me to see, with my glasses, that its eyes were 
open and winking—which fact was taken as proof that the bird was not asleep. 
On the third morning I saw nothing really suggestive of a rest period. But 
as my observation had to be made this time in the midst of breaking camp and 
packing up, I could not see much of what the birds were doing. 
When one reflects that work begins early in the morning (by 6 o’clock at 
latest) and goes on almost incessantly, it seems not unlikely that three hours of 
it would bring fatigue enough to justify some minutes of complete rest. This 
question certainly deserves more study than I was able to give it. 
