332 
YOUNG YELLOW-BELLIED WOODPECKER. 
ving only two or three reddish points visible on the forehead, 
yet the patch on the breast is quite as obvious as it is found 
in the adult state. In young birds of the first and second 
years, this patch is usually obsolete, the breast being chiefly 
dusky-grey, although the crown is entirely red. 
The specimen before us, possibly exhibiting one of the pe- 
riodical states of plumage of this changeable bird, is the only 
one we have been able to procure, amongst a great number of 
the young of both sexes in the ordinary dress. The well- 
marked patch on the breast might induce the belief that this in- 
dividual is an adult female, and that this sex, as several writers 
have erroneously remarked, is destitute of the red crown ; but, 
in addition to the fact that our specimen proved, on dissection, 
to be a male, we obtained, almost every day during the month 
of November, young birds of both sexes, with the crown en- 
tirely red, or more or less sprinkled with that colour, the in- 
termixture arising altogether from age or advanced plumage^ 
and not from sex. We are unable to state, with any degree 
of certainty, at what period the bird assumes the plumage now 
represented ; and we rather incline to the opinion that it is an 
accidental variety. 
For the purpose of comparison, we have added, on the same 
plate, the most interesting portion of a young bird, as it usu- 
ally appears in November of the first year ; and though the 
sexes are then alike in plumage, we had the figure taken from 
a young male, in order to complete the iconography of that 
sex. 
Vieillot’s figure represents the young before the first moult, 
when, like our anomalous specimen, they have no red on the 
crown ; differing, however, in not having the head of a glossy 
black, but of a dull yellowish-grey, and the patch on the breast 
also of a dull grey tint. 
