“Your ironweed sounds to me like a fairy tale.”
“Well, I’m only telling you what I’ve heard. I don’t know anything about it, myself; but they say it’s a very rare weed and that the woodpecker goes to look for it in the mountains so that it may harden and whet its beak on it. And anything you touch to that weed becomes as hard as the best steel. What a find that would be for my scythe and my hedging-bill, my sickle and grafting-knife! I know many a man that would give a bag of gold for the woodpecker’s secret.”
The young cabbage plants had by this time received enough water, and it was now the lettuce’s turn. Jacques went back to his work and left the boys to puzzle over the question whether or not there was any truth in this story of the woodpecker’s fear lest it might bore through the tree trunk with each peck of its beak. They brought the matter up that evening in their talk with their uncle.
“There is both truth and falsehood in what my good Jacques told you,” he said. “The true is what he saw with his own eyes, the false what he repeats from hearsay among the country folk. He told you correctly about the woodpecker’s different cries, which he knows so well from having heard them over and over again; and he was right about the bird’s way of running around to the other side of the trunk that it has just struck several times with its beak. All the rest is false, or, rather, an amusing legend with a basis of fact which we will now examine. [[172]]
“Woodpeckers live solely on insects and larvæ, especially those species of insects and larvæ that are found in wood. The large grubs of capricorn-beetles, stag-beetles, long-horn beetles, and others are their favorite dish. To get at them they have to clear away the dead bark and bore into the worm-eaten wood beneath. The instrument used in this rough work is the bird’s beak, which is straight and wedge-shaped, square at the base, fluted lengthwise, and shaped at the point like a carpenter’s chisel. It is so hard and durable that, in order to account for a tool of such perfection, some simple-minded wood-cutter made up the story that has been repeated ever since, the childish story of the ironweed. Need I tell you that there is nothing in the world that by its mere touch can give to objects the hardness of iron or steel?”
“I had my doubts,” Jules declared, “when Jacques was telling us about it; I couldn’t believe in his wonderful weed.”
“The woodpecker has no need to rub its beak against anything to give it the hardness necessary for the work to be done; it is born with a good strong beak, to begin with, and keeps it to the end, and that beak never has to be retempered. It is the continuation of a very thick skull which can withstand rather violent shocks, and it is operated by a short, strong neck which can keep up its hammering without fatigue even should the bird wish to bore into the very heart of a tree trunk. After it has drilled its hole the woodpecker darts into it an exceedingly [[173]]long tongue, worm-shaped and viscous—that is, coated with a sort of mucilage made by the saliva—and armed with a hard barbed point with which it transfixes the larvæ that have been uncovered.
“To climb the trunk of the tree to be operated upon and, for hours at a time if need be, to stay there where larvæ seem to be lurking, the woodpecker has short, muscular legs which end in stout claws, each foot having four talons or toes, two pointing forward and two backward, armed with curved nails of great strength. The bird’s way of standing on the vertical surface of a tree trunk is made possible not only by the division of its talons as I have described them, with their strong nails clinging to rough bark, but also by a third support furnished by the tail. The large tail feathers are stiff, slightly bent downward, worn at the tip, and supplied with rough barbs. When the woodpecker starts in on what promises to be a long job, it plants itself firmly on the tripod of its tail and two feet and holds itself steady even in positions that would seem to be highly uncomfortable. Without fatigue and without pause it can strip an entire tree trunk of its dried-up bark.
“The objects of its persevering search are the insects hidden under this bark. It can tell by the sound made when it strikes the tree with its beak whether or not the wood is decayed and full of insects, a hollow sound being of good omen to the bird. If the wood does not give out this hollow sound, the woodpecker [[174]]knows that further drilling at that point would be but so much labor wasted. In the first case it strips off the bark, makes the wood beneath fly this way and that in a shower of little chips, clears off the worm-hole dust, and finally reaches the plump grub in its snug retreat. In the second case it strikes two or three well-directed blows to start the dry bark and frighten any insects that may be lurking underneath. Immediately this insect population runs in alarm, some to the right, others to the left, toward the opposite side of the tree trunk; but the woodpecker, knowing well enough what is going on, reaches the other side in time to nab the fugitives.”
