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The yellow-bellied seemed to be confined to deep and rather swampy woods in the valley, and to the mountain-side forests; being most numerous on Mount Lafayette, where it ran well up toward the limit of trees. In his notes, the yellow-belly may be said to take after both the least flycatcher and the wood pewee.
Often a single species or family will predominate, and one will remember "thrush days" or "woodpecker days." Yellow-bellied sapsuckers cross the path, flickers call and hammer in every grove, while in the orchards, and along the old worm-eaten fences, glimpses of red, white, and black show where redheaded woodpeckers are looping from trunk to post.
The walls were quite smooth and clean and new. I shall never forget the circumstances of observing a pair of yellow-bellied woodpeckers the most rare and secluded, and, nest to the red-headed, the most beautiful species found in our woods breeding in an old, truncated beech in the Beaverkill Mountains, on offshoot of the Catskills.
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND: The species threatened with extinction are the golden plover, American woodcock, pied-billed grebe, red-throated loon, sooty shearwater, gadwall, ruddy duck, black-crowned night heron, Hudsonian godwit, kildeer, northern pileated woodpecker, chimney swift, yellow-bellied flycatcher, red-winged blackbird, pine finch, magnolia warbler, ruby-crowned kinglet.
The yellow-bellied sapsucker is, at this time of year, one of our most abundant woodpeckers, and in its life we have an excellent example of that individuality which is ever cropping out in Nature the trial and acceptance of life under new conditions.
As the yellow-bellied woodpecker was the most abundant species in these woods, I attributed it to him. It is the one sound that still links itself with those scenes in my mind. At sunset the grouse began to drum in all parts of the woods about the lake. I could hear five at one time, thump, thump, thump, thump, thr-r-r-r-r-r-rr. It was a homely, welcome sound.
In this retired corner the tawny thrush built her nest, and the hermit filled its aisles with music, while on the trespass notices hung here, the yellow-bellied woodpecker drummed and signaled. It was filled with interest and with pleasant memories, and I lingered here for some time. Then as the road led me still farther away, I turned back.
My only comfort was in thinking of woodpecker little folk, the yellow-bellied family whose loud and insistent baby cries we had listened to for days, the downy and hairy, and the golden-wing. They were all warm and snug, if they could only be persuaded to stay at home. But from what I have seen of young birds, when their hour strikes they go, be it fair or foul.
Emerson rhymes it with bear, Lowell rhymes it with hear, One makes it woodpeckair, The other, woodpeckear. But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it. Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodpeckers is the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird- song is capable of.
Part of the day I spent strolling about the woods, looking up old acquaintances among the birds, and, as always, half expectant of making some new ones. Curiously enough, the most abundant species were among those I had found rare in most other localities, namely, the small water-wagtail, the mourning ground warbler, and the yellow-bellied woodpecker.
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