For five years, with each returning spring, a pair of red-headed
woodpeckers has come, to make their nest and rear their brood of young
near my cabin door. It was on a cold drizzly day the last of April, when
I first observed my new neighbor. He was closely watching me as he
dodged about the trunk of a dead tree standing in the yard.
Unmindful of the falling rain, he put in the day pecking and pounding
away, seemingly in search of food, occasionally flying away or hitching
around the tree as some one passed, returning to his quest as soon as
the coast was clear.
Not until the next morning on awaking and hearing my neighbor
industriously hammering away, did I suspect he was making a nest, having
selected a place on the trunk of the tree about ten feet from the
ground, and facing the noon-day sun. He proved to be no stickler for
time, working early and late with short intermissions, when he would
dart out into the air and stop some passing insect that was quickly
disposed of. At the end of two weeks the nest had been completed and on
the same day the female arrived. Was it a coincidence? It would seem so,
for each succeeding year the male preceded his mate by a fortnight, in
which time the place was selected and the new home made ready in which
there was no straw, no feathers, nothing but the deep cavernous pocket,
clean and fresh, perfumed with the pungent odor of decaying wood.
As the days went by they came to be less afraid of and more neighborly
with me, paying little or no attention to my passing or repassing.
After repeatedly testing every available object in the vicinity of the
nest, the male finally selected as his drumming place the roof-board of
the cabin, where in lieu of song, he beat off many a short strain, like
the roll of a snare drum, that was intended for and easily heard by his
mate as she kept warm the eggs in the nest near by.
In the matter of incubating each took part, though the female devotes by
far the more time, usually remaining on the nest from one to two hours,
when the old man would spell her for about twenty minutes, in which time
she makes her toilet and indulges her insectivorous appetite. At the end
of two weeks they carried out of the nest and dropped, as they flew
across the yard, the broken fragments of shell. Now the greatest of all
mysteries has taken place. Like some beautiful creation of art that is
to be, but as yet is an unexpressed thought in some human brain, so the
bird within the egg is but a thought till, warmed by the parent’s soft
downy breast, the life lines throb and pulsate till the swelling life
within bursts the shell. Now instead of eggs requiring warmth the old
birds have two hungry mouths demanding food, that keeps them busy. Yet
they knew it, knew it all from the very first; every act was
intelligent, not instinctive. During the first days of the baby birds,
much care was given to the preparation of their food; the legs, wings
and antennae were removed from each bug or beetle. On some dead limb
convenient to the nest, a small hole the size of a lady’s thimble had
been prepared, and into this improvised mortar the body of the insect
was placed and pounded to a pulp before feeding. This care was not long
continued, as the young birds were soon capable of eating whatever is
given them.
The next ten days were full of business for my neighbors. Throughout the
days they were constantly in pursuit of the passing life that filled the
air. Each catch was quickly delivered to the baby birds, whose appetite
seemed never to be satisfied.
The young birds quickly grew to be squabs, and their bodies were covered
with a downy coat resembling fur more than feathers. Soon came the last
week in the home before their formal “coming out.” Feathers quickly took
the place of down; the rapid feeding was greatly lessened, to which the
baby birds made constant complaint in a whimpering cry as they peeked
out of the nest into the big world where so soon they were to be
launched on their first flight, never to return to the nest.