Woodchopper

“ The woodchuck is the true serf among our animals; he belongs to the soil, and savors of it. He is of the earth, earthy. There is generally a decided odor about his dens and lurking places, but it is not at all disagreeable in the clover-scented air; and his shrill whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies the farm dog from the interior of the stone wall, is a pleasant summer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck is not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass I have never before seen. ”

“ These must depend on finding the abandoned hole of some Woodpecker, or the natural hollow of some tree. It not infrequently happens that such birds are obliged to search far and wide for a hole in which they can make their abode. It is customary for those who take care of lawns and city parks to chop away and remove all dead limbs or dead trees. As very few Woodpeckers ever attempt {217} to dig a nesting hole in a living tree, such work of the axeman means that when the season comes for the rearing of young, all mated Woodpeckers must move on to where more natural conditions await them. ”

“ It is thus evident that the Woodpeckers are great conservators of forests. To them, more than to any other agency, we owe the preservation of timber from hordes of destructive insects.
The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, living his almost solitary life in the vast and nearly impenetrable cypress swamps, at a height of forty and fifty feet from the ground, is rarely seen by man. The specimens we present in Birds are so nearly life-like that our readers need only imagine themselves in the dense forest of cypress to realize a very natural scene. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even storing up fruits or roots is too great an effort for the indolent woodchuck, and in his hibernation stupor he draws only upon the fat which his lethargic summer life has accumulated within his skin.
As we might expect from a liver of such a slothful life, the family traits of the woodchuck are far from admirable and there is said to be little affection shown by the mother woodchuck toward her young. The poor little fellows are pushed out of the burrow and driven away to shift for themselves as soon as possible. Many of them must come to grief from hawks and foxes. ”

“ A number of Starlings collect on or about the tree in which the Woodpecker is, and they all in their turn mob him, and worry his life, until, tired out, he goes off in the hope of finding some other place where he can nest in safety. It is obvious that Woodpeckers are a class of birds whose habits are clearly not adapted to civilization, while woods and forests are continually decreasing in every direction; trees that show the slightest sign of decay are by the present utilitarian generation immediately felled. ”

“ This accounts for the woodpecker’s digging his pits above the lines of the holes already in the tree. The loss of this elaborated sap is a greater injury than the waste of a far larger quantity of crude sap, so that on the season of the year when the sapsucker digs his holes depends in large measure the amount of damage he does. The injury that he does to the wood itself is trivial. He is not a woodpecker except at time of nesting, and most woodpeckers prefer to build in a dead or dying branch, where their work does no hurt. ”

“ He says he has seen the red-headed woodpecker drop his wings till they trailed along the branch, as if to determine where the vibrations in the wood were strongest, and thus to decide where the grub was boring. But no one else appears to have noticed that woodpeckers are in the habit of trailing their wings as they drill for grubs. It would be a capital study for one to attempt to discover whether the woodpecker locates his grub by feeling, or whether he does it by hearing alone. Only one should be sure he is looking for grubs and not for beetles’ eggs, nor for ants, nor for caterpillars. ”

“ He has gone no farther than the dense shelter of a neighboring pine grove, whence he watches out until he thinks it safe to come home.
I take it that the same reason holds good for the plentifulness of woodcock this fall in certain swamps which I frequent. You may know that woodcock are plentiful in a place, even if you do not{160} see them, by the numbers of little round holes in moist, soft ground, usually where the swamp begins to give way to sandy upland. Here the bird goes jabbing for angleworms, which are his chief diet. ”

“ If the wood is cut “sled length,” which is a saving of time and also of chips, that will now be made at the door and will serve to boil the tea-kettle in summer, instead of rotting to slow fertilization of the woodlot, the chopper is one of the regular farm hands or a “day man,” and helps load the sled when it comes. If the wood is four foot, he is a professional, chopping by the cord, and not likely to pile his cords too high or long, nor so closely that the squirrels have much more trouble in making their way through them than over them ”

“ To the contrary, the finding after careful investigation (Beal, 1911) is: “The food of the pileated woodpecker does not interest the farmer or horticulturist, for it is obtained entirely from the forest or the wild copses on its edge. This bird does not visit either the orchard or the grain field, and all its work in the forest helps to conserve the timber * * *. Its killing should be strictly prohibited at all times.”
Behavior.—The bird is but little known—surprisingly little, considering how large a bird it is. It is a forest dweller; it lives almost wholly within the canopy of the treetops ”

“ There is our rare acquaintance the logcock, or pileated woodpecker, a bird nearly as large as the ivory-billed, one of the most persistent of our tree-climbers and more than any other woodpecker I ever observed given to scratching rapidly round and round a tree-trunk, [84] clinging at ease in almost any position except head-downward, and drilling incessantly and at all seasons for grubs; he is a typical woodpecker of the largest size, but his hind toe and claw are, if anything, a trifle shorter than his middle toe with its claw. ”

“ By means of its strong beak, the spotted woodpecker chisels out in the trunk of a tree, where the wood is more or less decayed, both a sleeping and a nesting hole. A circular entrance leads for some distance horizontally into the heart of the stem, after which the hole descends vertically for some way, and then expands into a large dome-shaped chamber, which serves as a receptacle for the clutch of three to eight white eggs, these being incubated by the male and female birds alternately. It is very generally believed that woodpeckers live entirely upon insects and other invertebrate animals ”

“ Ralph Hoffmann (1927) says that “in the breeding season the Arctic Three-toed Woodpecker makes a very loud rolling sound by drumming on dry limbs and when concerned about the nest a shrill kick-er-uck-a-kick. The ordinary call is tschick or tschuck.” A note of greeting, possibly part of a love-making performance, is thus described by Mr. Achilles (1906) : “Several times when the female was getting grubs in the dead spruce near the hole, the male would fly from some distant tree and alight near her. ”

“ The woodcock, another forest bird, seldom shows himself in broad daylight except when hunted; then he will rise a few feet, fly a short distance, drop and run, hiding again as quickly as he can. You will know the woodcock from the ruffed grouse by his long bill, his short legs, and his very short tail. He frequents the banks of wooded streams or the bogs of the forests and, like the grouse, nests on the ground; but the woodcock's nest seldom contains more than four eggs. [127]
Stalking wild birds. ”

“ Although often called a sapsucker, there is practically no evidence that it ever does any injury to trees in this way; any sap or cambium eaten is probably taken incidentally in its search for insects.
Behavior.—The hairy woodpecker is a much shier, more retiring bird than the confiding little downy; it is also more active and noisier; it usually will not allow such close approach but will dodge around the trunk of a tree or fly away, if an intruder comes too near, bounding through the air in a series of graceful dips and rebounds. ”

“ But because a bird nests in a hole in a tree, it is not necessarily a woodpecker. The sparrow-hawk, the house sparrow, the tree swallow, the bluebird, most species of wrens, and several of the smaller species of owls nest either in natural cavities in trees or in deserted woodpeckers’ holes. The chickadees, the crested titmice, and the nuthatches dig their own holes after the same pattern as the woodpecker’s. However, the large, round holes were all made by woodpeckers, and of those under two inches in diameter, our friend Downy made his full share. ”

“ MINOR BRITISH GAME BIRDS.
At the time of the heaviest bird migrations in autumn, vast flocks of woodcocks pitch on the English coasts. They stay through the winter, and in spring the majority again cross the wild North Sea en route to their northern breeding haunts. The woodcock is a "shifting" species, and just as any bird is erratic in its wanderings, so it is interesting to naturalists. The British Association is already on the track of the "woodsnipe," as are several individual observers in a more literal sense. ”

“ The woodchuck seems to be a link between the rabbit and badger; its colour is that of a leveret; it climbs like the racoon and burrows like the rabbit; its eyes are large, full, and dark, the lip cleft, the soles of the feet naked, claws sharp, ears short; it feeds on grasses, grain, fruit, and berries. The flesh is white, oily, and, in the summer, rank, but is eaten in the fall by the Indians and woodsmen; the skin is not much valued. They are easily killed by dogs, though, being expert climbers, they often baffle their enemies, clinging to the bark beyond their reach ”

“ Both these smaller woodpeckers are often seen on the rails of fences hunting for insects; and both remain here through the winter.
The handsome red-head, one of the migratory woodpeckers, is much more rare in our neighborhood than it used to be, but it is still found here, and we have seen them in the village. They are naturally sociable birds. A hundred miles to the westward, they are very numerous, even at the present day.
The large pileated woodpecker, or log-cock, a resident in Pennsylvania through the winter, is said to have been ”

“ The overwhelming majority of observers who have studied the red-cockaded woodpecker in its normal habitat concur in the opinion that the site of selection for the nest hole is in a living pine that, however, has begun to rot at the core, and this condition of the heart of the tree the birds seem to be able to discern with unfailing accuracy. ”

“ The bird may be described as wary rather than shy and is most adept at the familiar woodpecker trick of keeping the trunk of the tree between an approaching observer and itself.
As a rule they do not feed close to the ground, nor have I ever observed one on the ground even after the burning of a woodland, at which time the flicker and the red-bellied woodpecker may both be observed on the ground searching for grubs and insects killed by the blaze. ”

“ The young are not only hatched entirely naked, but seem to become fledged without any of the downy growth common to most birds. Their first plumage is dull in colour, and much marked beneath with bars, crescents and arrowheads.
Of generally similar habits are the two other woodpeckers which inhabit Britain—the pied or greater spotted and the barred or lesser spotted woodpecker—Dendrocopus major and D. minor—each of great beauty, from the contrasted white, blue-black and scarlet that enter into its plumage. ”

“ Downy or logcock or goldenwing, a woodpecker is an independent chap that I have never been able to call fairly; not even in spring, when he is all ears for a mate or a rival. Like many other birds, he will come quickly to an excited and deceptive squeaking between my [81] fingers, but to my best drumming he remains deaf or indifferent.
“Ye haven’t the right combination, b’y,” said Bob when I gave over my fruitless attempt, and using his hunting knife as a hammer he began talking woodpecker-talk on a dry stub. ”

“ At the first approach of cold weather they leave the hills, and come down into the plains, concealing themselves in the underwood, or the fern, or in the high grass, when the snow begins to fall. The woodcock is a melancholy bird, and somewhat misanthropic. Its habits are eminently anti-social; it flies but little, so little indeed that its wings seem scarcely of any use, and with the laziness already alluded to that forms its characteristic feature, it seeks out a solitary spot, and having dug a hole amongst the dry leaves, there it will squat for days together without stirring. ”