The Woodpecker.
The woodpeckers are the true bird carpenters and do a great amount of good in destroying harmful insects and boring worms.
These birds are found most everywhere in the United States, several species remaining in the northern States throughout the year.
Two of the best known woodpeckers, the hairy woodpecker and the downy woodpecker, range over a greater part of the United States.
One of the larger woodpeckers familiar to us all is the flicker, or golden winged woodpecker.
Most all of the woodpeckers will adopt the artificial house, especially those hollowed out of a split piece of limb.
Bird House Material.
Great varieties of houses can be constructed of half inch lumber and can be made very attractive to the eye. Other material, however, can be utilized.
The most natural Bird Homes, and such as may often be provided with the least trouble, are pieces of hollow limbs or small hollow trunks of trees, or the old nesting holes of woodpeckers. If no limbs with suitable cavities are found, they may be made by taking a piece of a limb, about eight inches in diameter and fourteen to sixteen inches long, dividing it in half, with a rip saw, from one end to within three inches of the other, where the cut is met by a right-angle cut from the side. After this an entrance hole of the required size is made through the shorter or front half.
The two halves are hollowed out, as shown in Plate [19], so as to form a cylindrical cavity about three and one-half inches in diameter and ten inches deep; then the two halves are placed together and held with screws or bolts. A similar Bird Home is made by boring an auger hole from one end of a piece of limb to within a couple inches of the other, plugging the bored end, and making an entrance hole near the other end. These homes are adapted to woodpeckers, bluebirds, house wrens, chickadees and tree swallows. A little larger home of the same type is required for crested fly catchers and decidedly larger ones for the flicker.