The migrant woodpecker whose cheery cackle assures us of the certainty
of spring is rich in names that well befit him. If you take to
high-sounding titles for your humble friends, you will accept _Colaptes
auratus_, as he flies above you, borrowing more gold of the sunbeams
that shine through his yellow pinions, or will be content to call him
simply golden-winged. When he flashes his wings in straight-away flight
before you, or sounds his sharp, single note of alarm, or peers down
from the door of his lofty tower, or hangs on its wooden wall, or
clinging to a fence stake displays his mottled back, you recognize the
fitness of each name the country folk have given him--flicker,
yellow-hammer, yarrup, highhole or highholder, and what Thoreau often
termed him, partridge-woodpecker. It is a wonder that the joyous cackle
wherewith he announces his return from his winter sojourn in the South
has not gained him another, and that love note, so like the slow
whetting of a knife upon a steel, still another. Perhaps it is because
they are especially sounds of spring and seldom if ever heard after the
season of joyful arrival and love-making.
During the same season you frequently hear him attuning his harsh sharp
voice to its softest note of endearment, a long-drawn and modulated
variation of his cackle. When household cares begin, the lord and lady
of the wooden tower, like too many greater and wiser two-legged folk,
give over singing and soft words. At home and abroad their deportment is
sober and business-like, and except for an occasional alarm-cry they are
mostly silent.
As you wander through the orchard of an early midsummer day and pause
beside an old apple-tree to listen to the cuckoo's flute or admire the
airy fabric of the wood pewee's nest, a larger scale of lichen on the
lichened boughs, you hear a smothered vibrant murmur close beside you,
as if the heart of the old tree was pulsating with audible life. It is
startlingly suggestive of disturbed yellow-jackets, but when you move
around the trunk in cautious reconnoissance, you discover the round
portal of a flicker's home, and the sound resolves itself into
harmlessness. It is only the callow young clamoring for food, or
complaining of their circumscribed quarters.
Not many days hence they will be out in the wide world of air and
sunshine of which they now know as little as when they chipped the
shell. Lusty fellows they will be then, with much of their parents'
beauty already displayed in their bright new plumage and capable of an
outcry that will hold a bird-eating cat at bay. A little later they will
be, as their parents are, helpful allies against the borers, the
insidious enemies of our apple-tree. It is a warfare which the
groundling habits of the golden-wings make them more ready to engage in
than any other of the woodpecker clans.
In sultry August weather, when the shrill cry of the cicada pierces the
hot air like a hotter needle of sound, and the dry husky beat of his
wings emphasizes the apparent fact of drouth as you walk on the
desiccated slippery herbage of meadow and pasture, the golden-wings with
all their grown-up family fly up before you from their feast on the ant
hills and go flashing and flickering away like rockets shot aslant, into
the green tent of the wild cherry trees to their dessert of juicy black
fruit.
Early in the dreariness of November, they have vanished with all the
horde of summer residents who have made the season of leaf, flower, and
fruit the brighter by their presence. The desolate leafless months go
by, till at last comes the promise of spring, and you are aware of a
half unconscious listening for the golden-wings. Presently the loud,
long, joyous iteration breaks upon your ear, and you hail the
fulfillment of the promise and the blithe new comer, a golden link in
the lengthening chain that is encircling the earth.