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I think how Solomon finished that beautiful description of spring, "And the voice of the turtle is heard in the land," and see that a description of spring in this farming country, to be equally characteristic, should culminate in like manner, "And the call of the high-hole comes up from the wood."
Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithology than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. The cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples, the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs, the woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for ants.
These still, hazy, brooding mid-April mornings, when the farmer first starts afield with his plow, when his boys gather the buckets in the sugar-bush, when the high-hole calls long and loud through the hazy distance, when the meadowlark sends up her clear, silvery shaft of sound from the meadow, when the bush sparrow trills in the orchard, when the soft maples look red against the wood, or their fallen bloom flecks the drying mud in the road, such mornings are about the most exciting and suggestive of the whole year.
Not one of them cried aloud and though in their humorous antics more than one cried, "flicker, flicker, flicker," there was in it none of the usual horse-laugh tone of the high-hole when he is on a rampage. It was reduced to a gentle whinny that seemed to vie with the boudoir-built notes of the robins.
Many of our most familiar birds, which are inseparably associated with one's walks and recreations in the open air, and with the changes of the seasons, are yet awaiting their poet, as the high-hole, with his golden-shafted quills and loud continued spring call; the meadowlark, with her crescent-marked breast and long-drawn, piercing, yet tender April and May summons forming, with that of the high-hole, one of the three or four most characteristic field sounds of our spring; the happy goldfinch, circling round and round in midsummer with that peculiar undulating flight and calling PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, at each opening and shutting of the wings, or later leading her plaintive brood among the thistle-heads by the roadside; the little indigo- bird, facing the torrid sun of August and singing through all the livelong summer day; the contented musical soliloquy of the vireo, like the whistle of a boy at his work, heard through all our woods from May to September:
Some think he is called the Flicker because he has a way of flicking his wings, and the Yellow Hammer because he hammers on trees with the beak and has fine golden wing-linings. The nest of the one you saw is in a hole, high up in the old sassafras by the side fence, and some say that this is why another of his names is High-hole.
Hardly less ridiculous to our eyes is the elaborate performance of our most common woodpecker, the flicker, or high-hole. Two or three male birds scrape and bow and pose and chatter about the demure female, outrageously undignified as compared with their usual behaviour. They do everything save twirl their black moustaches!
The woodpeckers would be without home, food, and resting-place; except, possibly, the flicker, or high-hole, who is either a retrograde or a genius, whichever we may choose to consider him, and could live well enough upon ground ants. But as to his nest he would have to sharpen his wits still more to solve successfully the question of the woodpecker motto, "What is home without a hollow tree?"
The squirrels are now venturing out, and the woodpeckers and nuthatches run briskly up the trees. The crow begins to caw, with his accustomed heartiness and assurance; and one sees the white rump and golden shafts of the high-hole as he flits about the open woods.
It is, by the way, a little remarkable how many of the Western birds seem merely duplicates of the Eastern. Thus, the varied thrush of the West is our robin, a little differently marked; and the red-shafted woodpecker is our golden-wing, or high-hole, colored red instead of yellow.
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