PILEATED WOODPECKER. 
m 
Wherever he perceives a tree beginning’ to decay, he 
examines it round and round with great skill and dex- 
terity, strips off the hark in sheets of five or six feet 
in length, to get at the hidden cause of the disease, 
and labours with a gaiety and activity really surprising. 
I have seen him separate the greatest part of the bark 
from a large dead pine tree, for twenty or thirty feet, 
in less than a quarter of an hour. Whether engaged 
in flying from tree to tree, in digging, climbing, or 
barking, he seems perpetually in a hurry. He is ex- 
tremely hard to kill, clinging close to the tree even 
after he has received his mortal wound ; nor yielding 
up his hold but with his expiring breath. If slightly 
wounded in the wing, and dropt while flying, he 
instantly makes for the nearest tree, and strikes with 
great bitterness at the hand stretched out to seize him ; 
and can rarely be reconciled to confinement. He is 
sometimes observed among the hills of Indian corn, 
and it is said by some that he frequently feeds on it. 
Complaints of this kind are, however, not general; 
many farmers doubting the fact, and conceiving that at 
these times he is in search of insects which lie con- 
cealed in the husk. I will not be positive that they 
never occasionally taste maize ; yet I have opened and 
examined great numbers of these birds, killed in various 
parts of the United States, from Lake Ontario to the 
Alatamaha river, but never found a grain of Indian 
corn in their stomachs. 
The pileated woodpecker is not migratory, but braves 
the extremes of both the arctic and torrid regions. 
Neither is he gregarious, for it is rare to see more than 
one or two, or at the most three, in company. For- 
merly they were numerous in the neighbourhood of 
Philadelphia ; but gradually, as the old timber fell, and 
the country became better cleared, they retreated to 
the forest. At present few of those birds are to be 
found within ten or fifteen miles of the city. 
Their nest is built, or rather the eggs are deposited, 
in the hole of a tree, dug out by themselves, no other 
