NON-UNION CARPENTERS
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
Red-headed Woodpecker
Flicker
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OUR FIVE COMMON WOODPECKERS
If, as you walk through some old orchard or along the borders of a
woodland tangle, you see a high-shouldered, stocky bird clinging fast
to the side of a tree "as if he had been thrown at it and stuck," you
may be very sure he is a woodpecker. Four of our five common,
non-union carpenters wear striking black and white suits, patched or
striped, the males with red on their heads, their wives with less of
this jaunty touch of colour perhaps, or none, but wearing otherwise
similar clothes. Only the dainty little black and white creeping
warbler could possibly be confused with the smallest of these sturdy,
matter-of-fact artisans, although, as you know, chickadees, titmice,
nuthatches and kinglets also haunt the bark of trees; but the largest
of these is smaller than downy, the smallest of the woodpeckers. One
of the carpenters, the big flicker, an original fellow, is dressed in
soft browns, yellow, white and black, with the characteristic red
patch across the back of his neck.
It is easy to tell a woodpecker at sight or even beyond it, when you
see or hear him hammering for a dinner, or drumming a love song, {190}
or chiseling out a home in some partly decayed tree. How cheerfully
his vigorous taps resound! Hammer, chisel, pick, drill, and drum--all
these instruments in one stout bill--and a flexible barbed spear for a
tongue that may be run out far beyond his bill, like the
hummingbird's, make the woodpecker the best-equipped workman in the
woods. All the other birds that pick insect eggs, grubs, beetles and
spiders from the bark could go all over a tree and feast, but the
woodpecker might follow them and still find plenty left, borers
especially, hidden so deep that only his sticky, barbed tongue could
drag them out.
As you see his body flattened against the tree's side perhaps you
wonder why he doesn't fall off. Do you remember why the swifts, that
sleep against the inside walls of our chimneys, do not fall down to
the hearths below? Like them and the bobolink, the woodpeckers prop
themselves by their outspread, stiffened tails. Moreover, they have
their toes arranged in a curious way--two in front and two behind, so
that they can hold on to a section of bark very much as an iceman
holds a piece of ice between his tongs. Smooth bark conceals no larvae
nor does it offer a foothold, which is why you are likely to see
woodpeckers only on the trunks or the larger limbs of trees where old,
scaly bark grows.
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DOWNY WOODPECKER
A hardy little friend is the downy woodpecker who, like the chickadee,
stays by us the year around. Probably no other two birds are so useful
in our orchards as these, that keep up a tireless search for the
insect robbers of our fruit. Wintry weather can be scarcely too severe
for either, for both wear a warm coat of fat under their skins and
both have the comfort of a snug retreat when bitter blasts blow.
Friend downy is too good a carpenter, you may be sure, to neglect
making a cozy cavity for himself in autumn, just as the hairy
woodpecker does. The chickadee, titmouse, nuthatch, bluebird, wren,
tree swallow, sparrow hawk, crested flycatcher and owls, are not the
only birds that are thankful to occupy his snug quarters in some old
tree after he has moved out in the spring to the new nursery that his
mate and he make for their family. He knows the advantage of a
southern exposure for his hollow home and chisels his winter quarters
deep enough to escape a draught. Here he lives in single
blessedness--or selfishness?--with no thought now for the comfort of
his mate, who, happily, is quite as good a carpenter as he, and as
able to care for herself. She may make a winter home or keep the
nursery.
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Very early in the spring you will hear the downy, like the other
woodpeckers, beating a rolling tattoo on some resonant limb, and if
you can creep close enough you will see his head hammering so fast
that there is only a blur above his shoulders. This drumming is his
love song. The grouse is even a more wonderful performer, for he drums
without a drum, which no woodpecker can do. The woodpecker drums not
only to win a mate, however, but to tell where a tree is decayed and
likely to be an easy spot to chisel, and also to startle borers
beneath the bark, that he may know just where to tunnel for them, when
they move with a faint noise, which his sharp ears instantly detect.
This master workman, who is scarcely larger than an English sparrow,
occasionally pauses in his hammering long enough to utter a short,
sharp _peek, peek_, often continued into a rattling cry that ends as
abruptly as it began. You may know him from his larger and
louder-voiced cousin, the hairy woodpecker, not only by this call
note, but by the markings of the outer tail feathers, which, in the
downy, are white barred with black; and in the hairy, are white
without the black bars. Both birds are much striped and barred with
black and white.
When the weather grows cold, hang a bone with a little meat on it,
cooked or raw, or a lump of suet in some tree beyond the reach of
cats; then watch for the downy woodpecker's and the chickadee's visits
to your free-lunch counter.
[Illustration]
Our little friend downy
[Illustration]
The red-headed woodpecker
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HAIRY WOODPECKER
Light woods, with plenty of old trees in them, suit this busy
carpenter better than orchards or trees close to our homes, for he is
more shy than his sociable little cousin, downy, whom he as closely
resembles in feathers as in habits. He is three inches longer,
however, yet smaller than a robin. In spite of his name, he is covered
with black and white feathers, not hairs. He has a hairy stripe only
down the middle of his broadly striped back.
After he and his mate have decided to go to housekeeping, they select
a tree--a hollow-hearted or partly decayed one is preferred--and begin
the hard work of cutting out a deep cavity. Try to draw freehand a
circle by making a series of dots, as the woodpecker outlines his
round front door, and see, if you please, whether you can make so
perfect a ring. Downy's entrance need be only an inch and a half
across; the hairy's must be a little larger, and the flicker requires
a hole about four inches in diameter to admit his big body. Both mates
work in turn at the nest hole. How the chips fly! Braced in position
by stiff tail feathers and {194} clinging by his stout toes, the
woodpecker keeps hammering and chiseling at his home more hours every
day than a labour union would allow. Two inches of digging with his
strong combination tool means a hard day's work. The hole usually runs
straight in for a few inches, then curves downward into a pear-shaped
chamber large enough for a comfortable nursery. A week or ten days may
be spent by a couple in making it. The chips by which this good
workman is known are left on the nursery floor, for woodpeckers do not
pamper their babies with fine grasses, feathers or fur cradle linings,
as the chickadee and some other birds do. A well-regulated
woodpecker's nest contains five glossy-white eggs.
Sheltered from the rain, wind and sun, hidden from almost every enemy
except the red squirrel, woodpecker babies lie secure in their dark,
warm nursery, with no excitement except the visits of their parents
with a fat grub. Then how quickly they scramble up the walls toward
the light and dinner!
YELLOW-BELLIED SAPSUCKER
This woodpecker I am sorry to introduce to you as the black sheep of
his family, with scarcely a friend to speak a good word for him. {195}
Murder is committed on his immensely useful relatives, who have the
misfortune to look ever so little like him, simply because ignorant
people's minds are firmly fixed in the belief that every woodpecker is
a sapsucker, therefore a tree-killer, which only this miscreant is,
and very rarely. The rest of the family who drill holes in a tree
harmlessly, even beneficially, do so because they are probing for
insects. The sapsucker alone drills rings or belts of holes for the
sake of getting at the soft inner bark and drinking the sap that
trickles from it.
Mrs. Eckstorm, who has made a careful study of the woodpeckers in a
charming little book that every child should read, tells of a certain
sapsucker that came silently and early in the autumn mornings to feed
on a favourite mountain ash tree near her dining-room window. In time
this rascal killed the tree. "Early in the day he showed considerable
activity," writes Mrs. Eckstorm, "flitting from limb to limb and
sinking a few holes, three or four in a row, usually above the
previous upper girdle of the limbs he selected to work upon. After he
had tapped several limbs, he would sit patiently waiting for the sap
to flow, lapping it up quickly when the drop was large enough. At
first he would be nervous, taking alarm at noises and wheeling away on
his broad wings till his fright was over, when he would steal quietly
back to his {196} sapholes. When not alarmed, his only movement was
from one row of holes to another, and he tended them with considerable
regularity. As the day wore on he became less excitable, and clung
cloddishly to his tree trunk with ever increasing torpidity, until
finally he hung motionless as if intoxicated, tippling in sap, a
disheveled, smutty, silent bird, stupefied with drink, with none of
that brilliancy of plumage and light-hearted gaiety which made him the
noisiest and most conspicuous bird of our April woods."
But it must be admitted that very rarely does the sapsucker girdle a
tree with holes enough to sap away its life. He may have an orgie of
intemperance once in awhile, but much should be forgiven a bird as
dexterous as a flycatcher in taking insects on the wing and with a
hearty appetite for pests. Wild fruit and soft-shelled nuts he likes
too. He never bores a tree to get insects as his cousins do, for only
when a nest must be chiseled out is he a wood _pecker_ in the strict
sense.
You may know this erring one by the pale, sulphur-yellow tinge on his
white under parts, the white patch above the tail on his mottled black
and white back, his spotted wings with conspicuous white coverts, the
broad black patch on his breast extending to the corners of his mouth
in a chin strap, and the lines of crimson {197} on forehead, crown,
chin and throat. He is smaller than a robin by two inches, yet larger
than the English sparrow, who shares with him a vast amount of public
condemnation.
RED-HEADED WOODPECKER
A pair of red-headed woodpeckers I know, who made their home in an old
tree next to the station yard at Atlanta, where locomotives clanged,
puffed, whistled and shrieked all day long, evidently enjoyed the
noise, for the male liked nothing better than to add to it by tapping
on one of the glass non-conductors around which a telegraph wire ran.
When first I saw the handsome, tri-coloured fellow he was almost
enveloped in a cloud of smoke escaping from a puffing locomotive on
the track next the telegraph pole, yet he tapped away unconcerned and
as merrily as you would play a two-step on the piano. When the vapour
blew away, his glossy bluish black and white feathers, laid on in big
patches, were almost as conspicuous as his red head, throat and upper
breast. His mate is red-headed, too.
All the woodpeckers have musical tastes. A flicker comes to my
verandah to tap a galvanised rain gutter, for no other reason than the
excellent one that he enjoys the sound. Tin {198} roofs everywhere are
popular tapping places. Certain dry, dead, seasoned limbs of hardwood
trees resound better than others and a woodpecker in love is sure to
find out the best one in the spring when he beats a rolling tattoo in
the hope of charming his best beloved. He has no need to sing, which
is why he doesn't.
Fence posts are the red-head's favourite resting places. From these he
will make sudden sallies in mid-air, like a fly-catcher, after a
passing insect; then return to his post.
You remember that the blue jay has the thrifty habit of storing nuts
for the proverbial rainy day, and that the shrike hangs up his meat to
cure on a thorn tree like a butcher. Red-headed woodpeckers, who are
especially fond of beechnuts, acorns and grasshoppers, hide them away,
squirrel fashion, in tree cavities, in fence holes, crevices in old
barns, between shingles on the roof, behind bulging boards, in the
ends of railroad ties, in all sorts of queer places, to feast upon
them in winter when the land is lean. Who knows whether other
woodpeckers have hoarding places? The sapsucker, the hairy and the
downy woodpeckers also like beechnuts; the flicker prefers acorns; but
do they store them for winter use? The red-head's thrifty habit was
only recently discovered: has it been only recently acquired?
[Illustration]
The sapsucker
[Illustration]
Baby flickers just out of their hole
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It must be simpler to store the summer's surplus than to travel to a
land of plenty when winter comes. Heretofore this red-headed cousin
has been reckoned a migratory member of the home-loving woodpecker
clan, but only where he could not find plenty of beechnuts to keep him
through the winter.
FLICKER
_Called also: High-hole; Clape; Golden-winged
Woodpecker; Yellow-hammer; Yucker._
Why should the flicker discard family traditions and wear clothes so
different from those of his relations? His upper parts are dusty
brown, narrowly barred with black, and the large white patch on his
lower back, so conspicuous as he flies from you, is one of the best
marks of identification on his big handsome body. His head is gray
with a black streak below the eye, and a scarlet band across the nape
of the neck, while the upper side of the wing feathers is black
relieved by golden shafts. Underneath, the wings are a lovely golden
yellow, seen only when the bird flies toward you. His breast, which is
a pale, pinkish brown, is divided from the throat by a black crescent,
smaller than the meadowlark's, and below this half-moon of jet there
are many black spots. {200} He is quite a little larger than a robin,
the largest and the commonest of our five non-union carpenters.
See him feeding on the ground instead of on the striped and mottled
tree trunks, where his black and white striped relatives are usually
found, and you will realise that he wears brown clothes, finely
barred, because they harmonise so perfectly with the brown earth. What
does he find on the ground that keeps him there so much of the time?
Look at the spot he has just flown from and you will doubtless find
ants. These are chiefly his diet. Three thousand of them, for a single
meal, he has been known to lick out of a hill with his long, round,
extensile, sticky tongue. Evidently this lusty fellow needs no tonic.
His tail, which is less rounded than his cousins', proves that he has
little need to prop himself against tree trunks to pick out a dinner;
and his curved bill, which is more of a pickaxe than a hammer, drill,
or chisel, is little used as a carpenter's tool except when a nest is
to be dug out of soft, decayed wood. Although he can beat a rolling
tattoo in the spring, he has a variety of call notes for use the year
through. Did you ever see the funny fellow spread his tail and dance
when he goes courting? Flickers condescend to use old holes deserted
by their relatives who possess better tools. You must have noticed
{201} all through these bird biographies that the structure and
colouring of every bird are adapted to its kind of life, each member
of the same family varying according to its habits. The kind of food a
bird eats and its method of getting it, of course, bring about most,
if not all, of the variations from the family type. Each is fitted for
its own life, "even as you and I."
Like your pet pigeon, the hummingbird, and several other birds, parent
flickers pump partly digested food from their own stomachs into those
of their hungry babies. Imagine how many trips would have to be taken
to a nest if ants were carried there one by one! How can the birds be
sure they will not thrust their bills through the eyes of their blind,
naked and helpless babies in so dark a hole? It must be very difficult
to find the mouths and be sure none is neglected. Like the little pig
you all know about, I suspect there is always at least one little
flicker in the dark tree-hollow that "gets none" each trip.
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