The Woodpeckers

Оглавление

Eckstorm Fannie Hardy. The Woodpeckers

FOREWORD: THE RIDDLERS

I. HOW TO KNOW A WOODPECKER

II. HOW THE WOODPECKER CATCHES A GRUB

III. HOW THE WOODPECKER COURTS HIS MATE

IV. HOW THE WOODPECKER MAKES A HOUSE

V. HOW A FLICKER FEEDS HER YOUNG1

VI. FRIEND DOWNY

VII. PERSONA NON GRATA

VIII. EL CARPINTERO

IX. A RED-HEADED COUSIN

X. A STUDY OF ACQUIRED HABITS

XI. THE WOODPECKER’S TOOLS: HIS BILL

XII. THE WOODPECKER’S TOOLS: HIS FOOT

XIII. THE WOODPECKER’S TOOLS: HIS TAIL

XIV. THE WOODPECKER’S TOOLS: HIS TONGUE

XV. HOW EACH WOODPECKER IS FITTED FOR HIS OWN KIND OF LIFE

XVI. THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN

APPENDIX

Отрывок из книги

The woodpecker is the easiest of all birds to recognize. Even if entirely new to you, you may readily decide whether a bird is a woodpecker or not.

The nuthatches are the only birds likely to be confused with woodpeckers, and these have the peculiar habit of traveling down a tree-trunk with their heads pointing to the ground. A woodpecker never does this; he may move down the trunk of the tree he is working on, but he will do it by hopping backward. A still surer sign of the woodpecker is the way he sits upon his tail, using it to brace him. No other birds except the chimney swift and the little brown creeper ever do this. A sure mark, also, is his feet, which have two toes turned forward and two turned backward. We find this arrangement in no other North American birds except the cuckoos and our one native parroquet. However, there is one small group of woodpeckers which have but three toes, and these are the only North American land-birds that do not have four well-developed toes.

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There is no rule about the color markings of the sexes, as in some families of birds. Usually the female lacks all the bright markings of the male; sometimes, as in the logcock, she has them but in more restricted areas; sometimes, as in the flickers, she has all but one of the male’s color patches; and in a few species, as the red-headed and Lewis’s woodpeckers, the two sexes are precisely alike in color. In the black-breasted woodpecker, sometimes called Williamson’s sapsucker, the male and female are so totally different that they were long described and named as different birds. It sometimes happens that a young female will show the color marks of the male, but will retain them only the first year.

Though the woodpeckers cling to the trunks of trees, they are not exclusively climbing birds. Some kinds, like the flickers, are quite as frequently found on the ground, wading in the grass like meadowlarks. Often we may frighten them from the tangled vines of the frost grape and the branches of wild cherry trees, or from clumps of poison-ivy, whither they come to eat the fruit. The red-headed woodpecker is fond of sitting on fence posts and telegraph poles; and both he and the flicker frequently alight on the roofs of barns and houses and go pecking and pattering over the shingles. The sapsuckers and several other kinds will perch on dead limbs, like a flycatcher, on the watch for insects; the flickers, and more rarely other kinds, will sit crosswise of a limb instead of crouching lengthwise of it, as is the custom with woodpeckers.

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