CARPENTER BIRDS.
THE Romans apparently looked on the woodpecker as the first inventor of spirit-rapping, and identified it with a remarkably old-fashioned god who had the gift of rustic prophecy. When they wanted to pay the god a compliment they set up a pillar with a woodpecker on the top. Later they set up his statue with the bird carved sitting on his head. The Spaniards, both in the Old and New World, called the woodpecker the " carpentero," to which his feats in drilling holes in wood fully entitle him, even more than does the sound of his hammer tapping on the trees.
The woodpeckers are so bright in plumage, so alike in their habits, and so thoroughly masters of their own peculiar way of making a living, in which they do not interfere with man, bird, or beast, that wherever they are numerous they attract, and deserve, a greater share of interest than falls to many other classes of bird. Yet M. de Buffon in one of his flights of fancy chose to identify their position in the community of the air with that of the French peasants on the great estates. He described them as condemned to spend their lives crawling on the trunks of trees, toiling for the meanest fare, unable to join in the gaieties of other creatures, and without even a change of diet, or a palate sensitive enough to appreciate the delicacies of life. All this commiseration was quite un- necessary. The woodpeckers have what is generally known as " a good time." Nor is it the case that they only live on the grubs which they bore out of rotten wood, or extract from the crevices of the bark.
Looking at the fine contrasts of black, white, crimson, or green on their plumage, it might be guessed that they have some affinities with birds of less northern range than our woodpeckers. The fact is that not only are there a great number of species in Northern and Tropical America, but that they are also numerous in North Africa, India, and as far south as the Celebes, where the " Wallace line " cuts them off from the Australian region. In both Central and Southern America, and in most tropical countries except Australia, they have for first-cousins those curious, ungainly birds, with oversized heads and beaks, called barbets. These are mainly fruit-eaters, though some feed on insects, which they take on the wing, as some of the insect-feeding king- fishers also do. The barbets bore a hole in a tree to lay their eggs in, and these are white like the woodpeckers'. So far are the latter, even those of England, from being confined entirely to a life of hard labour and incessant tree-climbing, that they all show a liking for fruit-eating, with which they are not always credited. They also feed freely upon insects on the ground, especially upon ants and their eggs, for which they tear the anthills to pieces with their beaks, using these as
spades or pickaxes quite as readily as they adapt them on the trunks of trees to the work of the auger or awl.
When seen running up the side of a tree the great spotted woodpecker is perhaps the most striking of all our wood- haunting birds. The black-and-white of the plumage is set off by the brilliant crimson crest. Though credited with being a fairly common bird, it is more seldom seen than any of the larger species haunting our woods. There is no reason why it should not be as common as the green woodpecker, which has very much increased since it gained the general protection now granted to it. But in the course of a life spent largely in observing birds the present writer has only seen it on five occasions. On two of these the nest was found, and one was in Richmond Park. The most carefully excavated nest, or rather hole, was made in a rotten willow-tree, some twelve feet from the ground. Instead of carrying away the chips, the bird had left them all to lie below the tree, where their fresh appearance at once attracted attention. Precisely the same negligence marked the beginning of a nesting-hole in Richmond Park. The fondness of these birds for fruit leads them to raid the orchards of small, black, and very sweet cherries, called in Devonshire " mazzards." In the same county, on the sea-coast, some distance from any woods, a family of lesser spotted woodpeckers invaded a garden, and could scarcely be driven away from the red currants and raspberries.
While in this country the greater spotted woodpecker is rarer than he is believed to be, the pretty little lesser spotted species is extremely common. It is so small, and frequents such high trees, that it is not easily seen. But in spring its note, made probably by striking the wood, which sounds like a stick drawn sharply along a wooden paling, may often be heard in cities. The bird is quite common in Oxford, and was a regular inhabitant of Kensington Gardens. It is still abundant in Richmond Park, and may be heard at Kew Gardens. The common green woodpecker has been among the birds which have benefited most by the protection of the law, and the sentiment of which the amnesty so proclaimed was only an expression. Formerly it was steadily killed down, partly for the sake of its skin, which was when stuffed a welcome addition to the glass cases containing a jay, a sparrowhawk, and a bullfinch which decorate cottage parlours, and partly from the persistent tradition that it was an enemy to trees. The belief that the birds bored large holes in sound oaks and elms, and so " bled " them, was widely spread. Consequently the woodman always asked his friend the keeper to shoot the wood- pecker. The green woodpecker, like those other tree-climbers, the nuthatch, the wryneck, and the creeper, is generally so absorbed in the business of holding on and hammering or prospecting that he is easily watched from a close distance. He does not show the gaiety and abandon of the nuthatch, nor is he so intensely energetic, as the latter. A unthatch smashing a nut seems as if he worked like the hammer of a self-cocking gun. But the woodpecker travels fast up the trunk, and scales off bits of bark with a sideways blow wherever he sees a likely lair for grubs. Having finished one tree, he flies off, and alights on another about half-way up the trunk. He can move downwards, but does this by dropping backwards, instead of turning round and running head down- wards like a nuthatch. When at work on the ground, the wood- pecker's method of feeding can be seen. On the summit of Sinodun Hill, above Dorchester, is a clump of trees much affected by woodpeckers; while the steep turf banks of the ancient Celtic ramparts of the prehistoric fortress which surround it, as well as the sides of the ditch, are full of ant- hills. As the scene lies far away from men and their work, the woodpeckers have the place all to themselves. Some years ago, on a sunny day in August, a whole brood, all fully fledged, with the old birds, were enjoying themselves in digging up the anthills. The writer first mistook them for a brood of partridges, both from their size and their position on the ground. They were easily stalked, and showed very little fear. Two or three birds would attack one ant-heap, digging away with their beaks, though their short claws were useless. They then retired a few inches, and leaning back with their heads held at some distance from the ground, shot out their long tongues like fishing-lines, and " whipped " the ants up at lightning speed. The Leak as in no cane used to pick up a single ant, but only as a mattock ; the tongue did the rest.
Every one who has done any bird-nesting knows of certain groves where there are " woodpecker trees." Some- times these trees are inhabited by both the small and large species, as the size of the holes shows. Their favourite prospecting ground is a tree which has received an injury that exposes a long length of wood without bark upon it, generally a Scotch fir. This exposed part is sometimes hollow, and always verging towards decay, which begins at the top. The woodpeckers find a place where the wood is in about the right condition, and bore a hole into it. If the interior is not yet hollow, they make a chamber and lay their eggs. They never plaster up the orifice, as a nuthatch sometimes does, but leave a clean round hole. Next year the woodpecker wants a clean nest, so it begins a foot or so lower down. If the wood is harder than it feels inclined to work upon, it goes to another tree. But in a year or two it comes back and tries the old one. In some of the woodpecker trees in the tall firs of Holly Water Clump in Woolmer Forest there are, or were, stems pierced like a flute, with a series of holes begun or completed ; for the bird will often dig in a few inches, and then abandon the work.
The wrynecks belong to a class of woodpeckers which have no spines in their tails, and instead of the strong and bright coloration of the woodpeckers and barbets, have feathers which imitate the colour of the bark more closely than do those of any other British bird, except perhaps the mimicry of dead sticks and leaves in the plumage of the nightjar. The resemblance is as close as that between the bark-haunting moths and their favourite resting-place, so much so that they are practically invisible except while on the ground, when, like the woodpeckers, they feed on ants, and in the same way. Their choice of a nest is often in a pollard willow, dead, or partly dead, and of which portions are in a condition like that of touchwood. Into this they burrow, though their bills are far weaker than those of the woodpecker proper, and can only deal with soft material.
In California there is a woodpecker nearly two feet long ; but the most remarkable species of the United States is the ivory-billed woodpecker, found in considerable numbers in the forests of the Lower Mississippi. Piles of bark, some of the pieces eight inches square, may be found under the decayed trees on which it is, or has been, busy at work. " We used to see enormous pine-trees," says Wilson, "with cartloads of bark lying around their roots, and chips of the trunk itself in such quantities as to suggest the idea that half-a-dozen axe- men had been at work the whole morning." The great black woodpecker of the Scandinavian and North European forests, which has occasionally strayed to England, bores holes in sound wood for its nest, as well as in decayed trees, but is said to choose the softer kinds for the work.
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