The Children's Book of Birds

by Olive Thorne Miller

The largest of this family that is common is the Golden-winged Woodpecker, or Flicker. He is as large as a pigeon. In the Eastern States is the golden-wing, in the West and California the red-shafted, who differs merely in the dress.

The gold-winged woodpecker has a brown back with black bars, and a light breast with heavy black spots. His wings and tail are yellow on the inside. He has a bright red collar on the back of his neck, a heavy black crescent on his breast, and black cheek patches or bars running down from the corners of his mouth.

The Red-shafted Flicker has red cheek patches instead of black, and omits the red collar altogether. His breast is a little grayer, and the wing and tail linings are scarlet. Both flickers have large white spots on the back, above the tail, which show very plainly when they fly.

These two varieties of the flicker are found from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Their ways of living are the same, and what is said of one will do as well for the other.

A flicker hangs himself up to sleep. He takes a good hold of a tree trunk, or upright limb, with his grapnel-shaped toes, presses his stiff tail against the bark, and hangs there all night. When he flies, he goes in great waves, as if he were galloping through the air.

The nest of this woodpecker is a snug little room in a tree trunk, or sometimes a telegraph-pole. He usually selects a tree that is dead, or partly so, but sometimes he takes a solid one. The little room is cut out by the strong, sharp beaks of the pair. The door of this home is just a round hole rather high up on the trunk. A passage is cut straight in for a little way and then turns down, and there the room is made. It has to be of pretty good size, for the bird is fond of a large family. Five or six and occasionally more young flickers have been found in a nest.

Fashions change in the bird world as well as in the human. Woodpeckers more than any others are changing their habits, and improving their condition. They have found an easier way to get a home than to chisel it out of wood. Nowadays woodpeckers often cut a hole through a board which admits them into a garret, a church tower, or the walls of an unused building, and make the nest there. Thus they save themselves much labor. One even cut out a home in a haystack.

These birds have changed too, it is said, in their notions about eating. They do not think it necessary to dig out every mouthful from under tree bark. The flicker feeds on the ground. He eats many insects, but mostly ants. When insects are scarce, he eats many wild berries—dogwood, black alder, poke-berries, and others—and the seeds of weeds.

Young woodpeckers in the nest are fed mostly upon insects. When they get big enough to climb up to the door of their snug home, they stick their heads out and call for something to eat. Then one can hardly pass through the woods without hearing them, for they have good loud voices. And of course they are always hungry.

The way they are fed is by regurgitation. That is, the old bird swallows the food she gets, and when she wants to feed, she jerks it up again. She thrusts her bill far down the little one's throat, as I told you the hummingbird does. Then she gives three or four pokes as if she were hammering it down. A young flicker does not seem to know how to swallow. A lady once picked up a nestling who was hurt, and to get him to eat anything she had to poke it down his throat herself.