Most of our familiar woodpeckers, however, are much smaller, and their plumage is a checker of black and white. Everywhere common in town, as well as among the farmlands, are three or four species, of which the most often seen, and the smallest, is the downy woodpecker, which gets its name from the broad stripe of soft white feathers up and down the middle of its back. It is not so large as a sparrow, and haunts the woods, the farmer's orchards, the shade-trees along the rural roads or beside the streets of our villages, and often makes itself a welcome visitor to the city parks and gardens. From morning till night, and all the year round, it scrambles up and down the trunks of the trees and round and round their branches, cleverly finding and dragging out insects or their young concealed under the scales of the bark; and though it digs many pits none is deep enough to injure the tree, as the only woodpecker which digs deep enough to do harm is the yellow-bellied one, which appears only in the spring, going far north to breed, and which country people call the sapsucker. The downy and its relatives, on the other hand, are doing good every day. Especially welcome is this active little visitor in winter, often with such small companions as the chickadee and nuthatch, when birds, or any other sort of living things are scarce, and we are longing for their return.
If you sit down for awhile at the foot of a tree, and keep very still indeed, without moving even so much as a finger, it will very likely come and sit on the trunk of another tree close by and begin to peck away with its long, sharp beak in search of insects.
How it makes the chips fly! Its beak is just like a chisel, and when the bird finds that a beetle or a grub has burrowed into the trunk, it does not take very long to dig it out. And it also has an extremely odd tongue, which is very long and slender, and very sticky, and has a curious tip. By means of this tongue the bird can often drag an insect out of its burrow without being obliged to dig right down to it.
Sometimes woodpeckers make a most amusing mistake. They hear the humming of a telegraph wire, and think that it must be caused by insects living in the posts. So they set to work with the utmost energy to dig them out, and are so diligent and so persevering that they have often been known to cut a big hole right through a telegraph post before finding out that there were no insects there after all!
There is another thing that we wish you especially to notice about the woodpecker, and that is the way in which it is enabled to sit on an upright tree-trunk for a long time without getting tired. The fact is that it really sits on its own tail, which serves as a kind of camp-stool! If you look at a woodpecker's tail you will find that the feathers are very short and very stiff, and that they are bent downward. When the bird perches on the trunk of a tree the tips of these feathers rest upon the bark and prop it up, so that there is very little strain upon the muscles of the feet and legs.
Downy, after the manner of its kind, uses its chisel-beak to form a deep and safe home in some old tree or stump, and often has enough confidence in its friends of the village or farm to choose a tall fence-post; and therein it deposits its pure white eggs and shelters its babies. Moreover, Papa Downy often digs near by a more shallow tunnel for himself, where he spends the night in safety and comfort as his mate is doing in her own snug chamber. The hairy woodpecker is very similar to the downy in dress, but one-half larger, and by no means so numerous or familiar. There are several northern and far-western kinds of checkered woodpecker such as the three-toed, the arctic and others, but their habits are very similar, and we may pass them by to speak of two species more notable in every way.
The Redhead and the Flicker
The redhead is most strikingly colored, for its whole head and neck are scarlet, its shoulders and back black, its wing-quills and rump white, and the tail black. It is a fairly large bird and a bold one, though like all woodpeckers it will slip around to the other side of the tree when it hears your step, and then peep out with comical caution to see whether you are dangerous. If you keep quiet it is likely soon to scuttle back and go on hammering, making the chips fly and the forest ring with its busy search after some buried grub. The Indians made a good deal of use of the scarlet feathers of this bird; and it is always a tempting mark for the wandering gunner, so that it is no wonder it is becoming rare in thickly settled regions.
A much less handsome but more numerous woodpecker in all parts of the country is the golden-winged, or flicker, or high-hole, for it goes by many names among the boys who love to trace it to its nesting-hole in some tall stub, and take, if they can, the pearly eggs that lie on a bed of chips in the bottom of the cavity. This nesting-hole, with its accurately round doorway and hall, goes straight into the tree-trunk for two inches or so, and then turns downward sometimes to the depth of a foot. This large woodpecker is not black and white, like most of the others, but wears a dress of greenish brown with wing-quills that look just as though they were gilded, and a small bonnet of red on the back of its head where there is no crest. In fact, the flicker is a queer sort of woodpecker generally, for it spends quite as much time in fields and gardens as in the woods, and much of this on the ground in search of insects—mostly ants.
Woodpeckers are noisy birds, both in their hammering and in their rough cries, and this one is perhaps the noisiest of all; but its call is so joyous that one cannot hear it without a sense of cheer.