10 
IVOEY-BILLED WOODPECKEE. 
swamps, whose crowded giant sons stretch their bare and blasted, 
or moss-hung, arms midway to the skies. In these almost inac- 
cessible recesses, amid ruinous piles of impending timber, his 
trumpet-like note, and loud strokes, resound through the soli- 
tary, savage wilds, of which he seems the sole lord and inhabi- 
tant. 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 of axemen had been at work 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, With such 
strength, and an apparatus so powerful, what havoc might he 
not commit, if numerous, on the most useful of our forest trees; 
and yet with all these appearances, and much of vulgar preju- 
dice 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 amuse- 
ment that he slices off the bark, or digs his way into the trunk. — 
For the sound and healthy tree is not in the least the object of 
his attention. The diseased, infested with insects, and hastening 
to putrefaction, are his favourites; there the deadly crawling 
enemy have formed a lodgement, between the bark and ten- 
der 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 diameter, and a hundred and fifty feet 
high! Yet whoever passes along the high road from George- 
town to Charleston, in South Carolina, about twenty miles from 
the former place, can have striking and melancholy proofs of 
