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Their enormous beaks are peculiarly adapted for searching in quest of eggs about the crevices of trees. The varieties here, include the Janeiro toucan, and the yellow-breasted toucan. The three next cases contain the many varieties of the Woodpecker. Woodpeckers are represented by naturalists as crows with a structure adapted to "an insect-eating life amidst growing timber."
In legs, feet and tails, there are corresponding differences. There are tails of all lengths and all forms; soft and stiff, square, acuminated, broad and fan-like, narrow and spine-like, and many as in the woodpeckers, and used as in that bird to support the body in climbing.
It is a particular catbird, identified, it may be, by a missing feather in his tail, that heads the foray on our strawberries and cherries. We recognize afar off either of the pair of "flickers," or yellow-shafted woodpeckers, which have set up their penates in the heart of the left-hand garden gatepost.
Ah, what good days those were, roaming about knee-deep in heather, catching the rare moths, chasing the squirrels that whisked up the fir stems and mocked us from their high perch, searching the hollow trees for woodpeckers' nests, eating the beech-nuts or pricking our fingers as we tried to open the husks of the Spanish chestnuts that grew by the lake!
Brake-fern rises five feet high; in some way woodpeckers are associated with brake, and there seem more of them where it flourishes. If you count the depth and strength of its roots in the loamy sand, add the thickness of its flattened stem, and the width of its branching fronds, you may say that it comes near to be a little tree.
It sleeps with the head hanging down after the manner of bats, hence Finn calls this pretty little bird the bat-parrot. Owls, like woodpeckers, do not patronise the Nilgiris very largely. This is the bird which perches on the roof of the house at night and calls to-whoo. Only four species of vulture occur on the hills of South India.
He keeps his body very close to the tree and uses his feet to creep about like a mouse or chipmunk; he also goes upside down, in a way that Woodpeckers never do, clings to the under side of a branch as easily as a fly to the ceiling, and often roosts or takes a nap head downward on the side of a tree-trunk a position that would seem likely to give him a severe headache, if birds ever have such things."
But the true parrots go a step further in the same direction than the woodpeckers or the toucans; for, in addition to prehensile feet, they have also a highly-developed prehensile bill, and within it a tongue which acts in reality as an organ of touch.
The inside preparations I could not witness, but day after day, as I passed near, I heard the bird hammering away, evidently beating down obstructions and shaping and enlarging the cavity. The chips were not brought out, but were used rather to floor the interior. The woodpeckers are not nest-builders, but rather nest-carvers.
Its constant supply of food, its shelter from the winds on every side, and its admirable hiding-places for nests, made this warm, sunny corner the chosen home of many birds. Warblers were there from early spring, heard, though not always seen. Veeries nested on its borders, woodpeckers haunted the dead trees at the edge, and all the birds of the neighborhood paid visits to it.
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