I.
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.