183 
POPULAR HISTORY OF BIRDS. 
to have designed him a distinguished characteristic in the 
superb carmine crest and bill of polished ivory^ with which 
she has ornamented him. His eye is brilliant and daring ; 
and his whole frame so admirably adapted for his mode of 
life^ and method of procuring subsistence^ as to impress on 
the mind of the examiner the most reverential ideas of the 
Creator/^ He proceeds to describe this noble woodpecker^ 
when engaged on a towering forest-tree^ among the almost 
inaccessible recesses of a cypress-swamp. ^*"His trumpet- 
like note and loud strokes resound through the solitary, sa- 
vage 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 cartloads of bark lying around their roots, and 
chips of the trunk itself in such quantities as to suggest the 
idea that half-a-dozen axemen 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.''^ It is only trees that have been attacked 
by insects that this useful bird frequents; so that ^^it is 
neither from motives of mischief nor amusement that he 
slices off the bark, or digs his way into the trunk/^ 
