tip-tap, tip-tap-tip.
'Tis the merry pitter-patter
Of the yellow-hammer's tap."

Whether or not it is mere play is perhaps yet an open question. The
drumming of the sapsucker, one of the most common sounds of the woods
and lawn, seemed sometimes simply for amusement, but again it appeared
exceedingly like a signal. A bird frequently settled himself in plain
sight of us, on one of the trespass notices in the woods, and spent
several minutes in that occupation, changing his place now and then, and
thus producing different sounds, whether with that intention or not. Now
he would tap on top of the board, again down one side, and then on a
corner, but always on the edge. Nor was it a regular and monotonous
rapping; it was curiously varied. One performance that I carefully noted
down at the moment reminded me of the click of a telegraph instrument.
It was "rat-tat-tat-t-t-t-t-rat-tat,"--the first three notes rather
quick and sharp, the next four very rapid, and the last two quite slow.
After tapping, the bird always seemed to listen. Often while I was
watching one at his hammering, a signal of the same sort would come from
a distance. Sometimes my bird replied; sometimes he instantly flew in
the direction from which it came. Around the house the woodpeckers
selected particular spots to use as drums, generally a bit of tin on a
roof, or an eave-gutter of the same metal. A favorite place was the
hindquarters of a gorgeous gilded deer that swung with the wind on the
roof of the barn.

So closely were they watched that the sapsuckers themselves were like
old acquaintances before the babes in the woods began to make
themselves heard. No sooner had these little folk found their voices
than they made the woods fairly echo. Cry-babies in feathers I thought I
knew before, but the young woodpecker outdoes anything in my experience.
No wonder the woodpecker mamma sets up her nursery out of the reach of
prowlers of all sorts; so loud and so persistent are the demands of her
nestlings that they would not be safe an hour, if they could be got at.
The tone, too, must always arrest attention, for it is of the nasal
quality I have mentioned. The first baby whisper, hardly heard at the
foot of the tree, has a squeaky twang, which strengthens with the
infant's strength, and the grown-up murmurs of love and screams of war
are of the same order.

It was during the nest-feeding days that we discovered most of the
sapsucker homesteads; for,