WHIP-POOR-WILL
The whip-poor-will’s chief distinction is its song—a song by itself, and familiar to every one. Some people call it mournful, and I fear there are still a few superstitious souls who listen to it with a kind of trembling. I have heard of the bird’s being shot because the inhabitants of a house could not bear its doleful and boding cry, as they were pleased to consider it. To my ears it is sweet music. I take many an evening stroll on purpose to enjoy it, and am perennially thankful to Audubon for saying that he found the whip-poor-will’s “cheering voice” more interesting than the song of the nightingale.
It will surprise unscientific readers to be told that the nearest relatives of whip-poor-wills and nighthawks are the swifts and the hummingbirds. As if a chimney swift were more like a whip-poor-will than like a swallow! and, still more absurd, as if there were any close relationship between whip-poor-wills and hummingbirds! Put a whip-poor-will and a ruby-throated hummer side by side and they certainly do look very little alike—the big whip-poor-will, with its mottled plumage and its short, gaping beak, and the tiny hummingbird with its burnished feathers and its long needle of a bill. Evidently there is no great reliance to be placed upon outside show, or what scientific men call “external characters.” We might as well say that the strawberry vine and the apple-tree were own cousins. Yes, so we might, for the apple-tree and the strawberry vine are cousins—at least they are members of the same great and noble family, the family of the roses! We shall never get far, in science or in anything else, until we learn to look below the surface.
XVI
THE FLICKER
The flicker is the largest of our common American woodpeckers, being somewhat longer and stouter than the robin. It is known, by sight at least, to almost every one who notices birds at all, and perhaps for this reason it has received an unusual number of popular names. “Golden-winged woodpecker,” which is probably the best known of these, comes from the fact that the bird’s wings are yellow on the under side. “Harry Wicket,” “Highhole,”—because its nest is sometimes pretty far above the ground,—“Yellowhammer,” and “Pigeon-woodpecker” are also among its more familiar nicknames.
Unlike other birds of its family, the flicker passes much of its time on the ground, where it hops awkwardly about, feeding upon insects, especially upon ants. As you come near it, while it is thus engaged, it rises with a peculiar purring sound, and as it flies from you it shows a broad white patch on its rump—the lower back, above the root of the tail. Every one who has ever walked much over grassy fields must have seen the bird and been struck by this conspicuous light mark. He must have noticed, too, the bird’s peculiar up-and-down, “jumping” manner of flight, by which it goes swooping across the country in long undulations or waves.
The flicker’s general color is brown, with spottings and streakings of black, and more or less of violet or lilac shading. On the back of its neck it wears a band of bright scarlet, and across its breast is a conspicuous black crescent.
It is fond of old apple orchards, and often makes its nest in a decaying trunk. In some places, near the seashore, especially,—where it is commoner than elsewhere in winter, and where large trees are scarce,—it makes enemies by its habit of drilling holes in barns and even in churches. I remember a meeting-house on Cape Cod which had a good number of such holes in its front wall—or rather it had the scars of such holes, for they had been covered with patches of tin. That was a case where going to church might be called a bad habit.
In fall and winter, if not at other seasons, the flicker feeds largely upon berries. In years when the poison ivy bears a good crop, I am pretty sure to find two or three flickers all winter long about a certain farm, the stone walls of which are overrun with this handsome but unwholesome vine, although it is hard to imagine that the dry, stony fruit should yield much in the way of nourishment, even to a woodpecker.