IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. 
11 
the most reverential ideas of the Creator. His manners have 
also a dignity in them superior to the common herd of Wood- 
peckers. Trees, shrubbery, orchards, rails, fence posts, and 
old prostrate logs, are alike interesting to those, in their 
humble and indefatigable search for prey ; but the royal 
hunter now before us, scorns the humility of such situations, 
and seeks the most towering trees of the forest; seeming 
particularly attached to those prodigious cypress 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 solitary 
savage 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 of axe-men had been at work there for the whole 
morning. The body of the tree is also disfigured with such 
transit from one tree to another, even should the distance be as much as a 
hundred yards, is performed by a single sweep, and the bird appears as if merely 
swinging itself from the top of the one tree to that of the other, forming an 
elegantly curved line. At this moment all the beauty of the plumage is exhi- 
bited, and strikes the beholder with pleasure. It never utters any sound whilst 
on wing, unless during the love season ; but at all other times, no sooner has 
this bird alighted than its remarkable voice is heard, at almost every leap which 
it makes, whilst ascending against the upper parts of the trunk of a tree, or its 
highest branches. Its notes are clear, loud, and yet very plaintive. They are 
heard at a considerable distance, perhaps half a mile, and resemble the false 
high note of a clarionet. They are usually repeated three times in succession, 
and may be represented by the monosyllable pait, pait, pait. These are heard 
so frequently as to induce me to say that the bird spends few minutes of the 
day without uttering them, and this circumstance leads to its destruction, which 
is aimed at, not because (as is supposed by some) this species is a destroyer of 
trees, but move because it is a beautiful bird, and its rich scalp attached to the 
upper mandible forms an ornament for the war-dress of most of our Indians, 
or for the shot-pouch of our squatters and hunters, by all of whom the bird is 
shot merely for that purpose.” — Ed. 
