12 
IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. 
numerous and so large excavations, that one can hardly con- 
ceive 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 prejudice against him, it may fairly be ques- 
tioned 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 amusement that he slices off the bark, 
or digs his way into the trunk. — For the sound and healthy 
tree is the least 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 tender 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 per- 
petrators 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 Georgetown to Charleston, 
in South Carolina, about twenty miles from the former place, 
can have striking and melancholy proofs of this fact. In some 
places the whole woods, as far as you can see around you, are 
dead, stripped of the bark, their wintry-looking arms and bare 
trunks bleaching in the sun, and tumbling in ruins before 
every blast, presenting a frightful picture of desolation. And 
yet ignorance and prejudice stubbornly persist in directing 
their indignation against the bird now before us, the constant 
and mortal enemy of these very vermin ; as if the hand that 
probed the wound to extract its cause, should be equally 
detested with that which inflicted it ; or as if the thief-catcher 
should be confounded with the thief. Until some effectual 
