18 
The Flicker 
Wild Berries 
Eaten 
mediately proceeded to make new ones. They have also cut holes through 
the weather-boarding under the eaves, and have been known to enter the 
church and fly about among the rafters when services were being held. 
Woodpeckers as a family secure their living chiefly by examining 
the bark of trees or picking into decayed wood, but the Flicker, which 
has its own way of doing things, seldom looks in such places for food. 
When it is hungry, you will usually find it on the ground hopping along 
in the grass or disturbing the fallen leaves in the woods. It eats beetles, 
moths, butterflies and a variety of other insects. Now and then it takes 
a little fruit as dessert, most of which comes from 
trees not cultivated for human food. Some of the 
fruits it eats are: Choke-cherry, wild black cherry, 
elder, dogwood, hackberry, Virginia creeper, sumac, poison-ivy, black- 
berry, blueberry, huckleberry, wild grape, cedarberry and persimmons. 
Of all the list of things that nature has provided so abundantly for 
the food of wild birds the Flicker likes nothing so well as ants. These 
he gets by tearing up their hills with his bill. This operation, of course, 
excites the ants very much, and when he begins his work of destroying 
their little, circular, funnel-shaped fortifications the word is quickly 
carried down through the intricate tunnels beneath the surface that some- 
thing terrible is happening. Out rush the ants to see what is the dis- 
turbance, and there stands the Flicker ready to seize them with its long 
tongue, which is shooting out continually for the purpose. 
Ants make up more than half of everything the Flicker eats. Be- 
cause of this fact alone, everybody ought to feel kindly disposed toward 
this bird, for ants are universally regarded as a decided nuisance. In 
some parts of the country long lines of ants may be seen any day march- 
ing in under the kitchen-door and carrying off fragments of food. In 
those regions they give the farmer’s wife no end of trouble. Ants do 
Harm Done damage in a more pronounced way than this. Prof, 
by Ants John H. Comstock, the noted entomologist, has this to 
say about ants in his Manual of the Study of Insects : 
“Writers long ago showed that ants protect plant-lice by driving 
away from them ladybugs and other enemies. Recently, however, Pro- 
fessor Forbes demonstrated that, in certain cases at least, a more impor- 
tant service is rendered. In his studies of the corn plant-louse, he found 
that this species winters in the wingless form in the earth of previously 
infested corn-fields, and that in the spring the plant-lice are strictly de- 
pendent upon a species of ant, which mines along the principal roots of 
the corn, collects the plant-lice, and conveys them into these burrows 
and there watches and protects them. Without the aid of these ants, the 
plant-lice were unable to reach the roots of the corn. Ants take very 
good care of their cattle (aphids), and will carry them to new pastures 
if the old ones dry up. They also carry the aphids’ eggs into their 
nests and keep them sheltered during the winter, and then carry the 
young plant-lice out and put them on plants in the spring.” 
