IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. 
133 
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 hark 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 
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 I and 
yet with all these appearances, and much of vulgar 
prejudice against him, it may fairly he 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 hark, 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 perpetrators of the 
destruction of his timber. Would it he 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 
