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There are four species of bats to be mentioned, besides moles and shrews, that would burrow in its roots if they are as hollow as the branches. There are thirteen species of birds, including several very interesting families of woodpeckers, that would live in a tree like that, not to speak of tree-toads, salamanders, brown tree-lizards, insects and slugs innumerable, and black-snakes "
Hence we can understand, bearing in mind that each organic being is trying to live wherever it can live, how it has arisen that there are upland geese with webbed feet, ground woodpeckers, diving thrushes, and petrels with the habits of auks.
In these things, of course, there can be but little variety, all the Saturday Woodpeckers of the same date being very much like each other. When, therefore, the people in the same circle meet each other, their conversation cannot be called very entertaining or very improving, if this is all they have to draw upon. It reminds one of the pictures in people's houses in the days of "Art Unions."
Couldn't 'a' lived without it. Look a' me. I'm so ragged that I got patches o' sunburn on my back an' belly. I'm what ye might call a speckled man. My feet 'a' been bled. My body looks like an ol' tree that has been clawed by a bear an' bit by woodpeckers. I've stuck my poker into the fire o' hell.
As it becomes older, it grows strikingly irregular and picturesque. Large special branches put out at right angles from the trunk, form big, stubborn elbows, and then shoot up parallel with the axis. Very old trees are usually dead at the top, the main axis protruding above ample masses of green plumes, gray and lichen-covered, and drilled full of acorn holes by the woodpeckers.
Nearby were great beds of brake-ferns, four and five feet high, groves of immense alders, sugar pines, some of which were fully eight feet through and the trunks of which were honeycombed with woodpecker holes. I saw and heard several woodpeckers at work. They had red top-knots, and the noise they made echoed through the woods more as if a sledge hammer had struck the tree than the bill of a bird.
The impossibility that the boy should have got so far on foot made Laetitia doubtful of his veracity, until she heard that a gentleman had taken him up on the road in a gig, and had driven him to a farm to show him strings of birds' eggs and stuffed birds of every English kind, kingfishers, yaffles, black woodpeckers, goat-sucker owls, more mouth than head, with dusty, dark-spotted wings, like moths; all very circumstantial.
"I don't know any other Woodpeckers who come down on the ground at all." "Tut, tut, tut, tut!" scolded Jenny. "Think a minute, Peter! Think a minute! Haven't you ever seen Redhead on the ground?" Peter blinked his eyes. "Ye-e-s," he said slowly. "Come to think of it, I have. I've seen him picking up beechnuts in the fall. The Woodpeckers are a funny family. I don't understand them."
The squirrels, leaving their accustomed feeding-grounds, betook themselves to the leafy oaks to gnaw out the acorn stores of the provident woodpeckers, but the latter kept up a vigilant watch upon their movements. I noticed four woodpeckers in league against one squirrel, driving the poor fellow out of an oak that they claimed.
Besides the species that we regularly count upon in winter, there are more or less irregular visitors at this season, some of them summer birds also, as the purple finch, cedar-bird, gold-finch, robin, the flicker, or pigeon woodpecker, and the yellow-bellied and hairy woodpeckers.
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