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LARGER IMAGE
Considerable difference of opinion exists as to the damage done by Woodpeckers in tapping sound trees, and many a poor bird pays the penalty of his life for his supposed destructive propensities. Mr. Waterton argues strongly on the side of the bird, and alleges that only rotten and unsound trees are attacked for the sake of a nesting habitation, or for the purpose of getting insects; but that this is not always the case was proved by the writer himself in the spring of 1878, when a boy was sent up to a hole in a beech-tree in Avington Park, in Hampshire. The tree was still perfectly sound, so sound, indeed, that the bird had evidently given up the idea of inhabiting it for that year, and had betaken himself elsewhere, after having excavated a round hole to the depth of two or three inches. In the same tree, a little lower down, was a similar hole, evidently made the previous year, when the bird had “tapped” the tree, and it was clear that he had returned again in the succeeding season, and had tried a little higher up in the trunk, to see if there were any chance of procuring a domicile. This proceeding must have injured the tree, and was the work of a Green Woodpecker, or Yaffle, whose laughing note was heard from another quarter of the park, even as the above examination was being conducted. In this part of Hampshire, though the bird is not persecuted by the owner of Avington, Mr. Edward Shelley, or by his keepers, the Green Woodpecker is rare; but in certain parts of Huntingdonshire the writer can remember to have found it very plentiful in his school-days, and it was a never-failing object in a country walk, flitting from tree to tree in front of the observer, and always keeping a sharp look-out from the opposite side of the trunk on which he settled. This species appears in old pieces of poetry under the various names of Yaffle, Woodwele, or Woodwale, Whetile, and it is in some places called “Hewhole,” Woodhacker, &c.[256]:—
GREEN WOODPECKER.
“The Skylark in ecstasy sang from a cloud,
And Chanticleer crowed, and the Yaffil laughed loud.”
The Peacock at Home.
“The Woodwele sang, and would not cease,
Sitting upon the spray;
So loud he wakened Robin Hood