IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. 



21 



Wherever he frequents he leaves numerous monuments of his in- 

 dustry 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 numerous and so large excava- 

 tions, that one can hardly conceive it possible for the whole to be 

 the work of a Woodpecker. With such strength, and an appara- 

 tus so powerful, what havoc might he not commit, if numerous, on 

 the most useful of our forest trees ; and yet with all these appear- 

 ances, and much of vulgar prejudice against him, it may fairly be 

 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 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 not the least object of 

 his attention. The diseased, infested with insects, and hastening 

 to putrefaction, are his favorites ; 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 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 diame- 

 ter, 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 pic- 



VOL. IV. F 



