Lesson XVI

The Red-headed Woodpecker

Leading thought—The red-headed woodpecker has very different habits from the downy and is not so useful to us. It lives upon nuts and fruit and such insects as it can catch upon the wing.

Methods—If there is a red-head in the vicinity of your school the children will be sure to see it. Write the following questions upon the blackboard and offer a prize to the first one who will make a note on where the red-head stores his winter food.

Observations—1. Can you tell the red-head from the other woodpeckers? What colors especially mark his plumage?

2. Where does the red-head nest? Describe eggs and nest?

3. What have you observed the red-head eating? Have you noticed it storing nuts and acorns for the winter? Have you noticed it flying off with cherries or other fruit?

4. What is the note of the red-head? Have you ever seen one drumming? What did he use for a drum? Did he come back often to this place to make his music?

Supplementary reading—“The House That Fell” in Nestlings of Forest and Marsh; Our Birds and their Nestlings, p. 90; Birds, Bees and Sharp Eyes, John Burroughs.

Another trait our woodpeckers have that endears them to me, and that has never been pointedly noticed by our ornithologists, is their habit of drumming in the spring. They are songless birds, and yet all are musicians; they make the dry limbs eloquent of the coming change. Did you think that loud, sonorous hammering which proceeded from the orchard or from the near woods on that still March or April morning was only some bird getting its breakfast? It is downy, but he is not rapping at the door of a grub; he is rapping at the door of spring, and the dry limb thrills beneath the ardor of his blows. Or, later in the season, in the dense forest or by some remote mountain lake, does that measured rhythmic beat that breaks upon the silence, first three strokes following each other rapidly, succeeded by two louder ones with longer intervals between them, and that has an effect upon the alert ear as if the solitude itself had at least found a voice—does that suggest anything less than a deliberate musical performance? In fact, our woodpeckers are just as characteristically drummers as is the ruffed grouse, and they have their particular limbs and stubs to which they resort for that purpose. Their need of expression is apparently just as great as that of the song-birds, and it is not surprising that they should have found out that there is music in a dry, seasoned limb which can be evoked beneath their beaks.

The woodpeckers do not each have a particular dry limb to which they resort at all times to drum, like the one I have described. The woods are full of suitable branches, and they drum more or less here and there as they are in quest of food; yet I am convinced each one has its favorite spot, like the grouse, to which it resorts, especially in the morning. The sugar-maker in the maple woods may notice that this sound proceeds from the same tree or trees about his camp with great regularity. A woodpecker in my vicinity has drummed for two seasons on a telegraph-pole, and he makes the wires and glass insulators ring. Another drums on a thin board on the end of a long grape-arbor, and on still mornings can be heard a long distance.

A friend of mine in a Southern city tells me of a red-headed woodpecker that drums upon a lightning-rod on his neighbor’s house. Nearly every clear, still morning at certain seasons, he says, this musical rapping may be heard. “He alternates his tapping with his stridulous call, and the effect on a cool, autumn-like morning is very pleasing.”—John Burroughs, in Birds, Bees and Sharp Eyes.