168 
PILEATED "WOODPECKER. 
at such times in a restlesnS uneasy manner from tree to tree, making the 
woods echo to his outcry. In Pennsylvania, and the Northern States, 
he is caUed the Black Woodcock ; in the Southern States, the Logcock. 
Almost every old trunk in the forest, where he resides, bears the marks 
of his chisel. Wherever he perceives a tree beginning to decay, he ex- 
amines it round and round with great skill and dexterity, sti'ips off the 
bark in sheets of five or six feet in length to get at the hidden cause of 
the disease, and labors with a gayety and activity really surprising. I 
have seen him separate the greatest part of the bark from a large dead 
pine-tree, for twenty or thirty feet, in less than a quarter of an hour. 
Whether engaged in flying from tree to tree, in digging, climbing or 
barking, he seems perpetually in a hurry. He is extremely hard to kill, 
clinging close to the tree even after he has received his mortal wound ; 
nor yielding up his hold but with his expiring breath. If slightly 
wounded in the wing, and dropped while flying, he instantly makes for 
the nearest tree, and strikes, with great bitterness, at the hand stretched 
out to seize him ; and can rarely be reconciled to confinement. He is 
sometimes observed among the hills of Indian corn, and it is said by 
some that he frequently feeds on it. Complaints of this kind are, how- 
ever, not general ; many farmers doubting the fact, and conceiving that 
at these times he is in search of insects which lie concealed in the husk. 
I will not be positive that they never occasionally taste maize ; yet I 
have opened and examined great numbers of these birds, killed in va- 
rious parts of the United States, from Lake Ontario to the Altamaha 
river, but never found a grain of Indian corn in their stomachs. 
The Pileated Woodpecker is not migratory, but braves the extremes of 
both the arctic and torrid regions. Neither is he gregarious, for it is rare 
to see more than one or two, or at the most three, in company. For- 
merly they were numerous in the neighborhood of Philadelphia ; but 
gradually as the old timber fell, and the country became better cleared, 
they retreated to the forest. At present few of these birds are to be 
found within ten or fifteen miles of the city. 
Their nest is built, or rather the eggs are deposited, in the hole of a 
tree, dug out by themselves, no other materials being used but the soft 
chips of rotten wood. The female lays six large eggs of a snowy white- 
ness ; and, it is said, they generally raise two broods in the same season. 
This species is eighteen inches long, and twenty-eight in extent ; the 
general color is a dusky brownish black ; the head is ornamented with 
a conical cap of bright scarlet ; two scarlet mustaches proceed from the 
lower mandible ; the chin is white ; the nostrils are covered with brown- 
ish white hair-like feathers, and this stripe of white passes thence down 
the side of the neck to the sides, spreading under the wings ; the upper 
half of the wings, is white, but concealed by the black coverts ; the 
lower extremities of the wings are black ; so that the white on the wing 
