inches, according to the softness of the tree and the urgency
of the mother bird to deposit her eggs. While excavating, male and
female work alternately. After one has been engaged fifteen or twenty
minutes, drilling, and carrying out chips, it ascends to an upper
limb, utters a loud call or two, when its mate soon appears, and,
alighting near it on the branch, the pair chatter and caress a moment;
then the fresh one enters the cavity and the other flies away.

A few days since, I climbed up to the nest of the downy woodpecker, in
the decayed top of a sugar-maple. For better protection against
driving rains, the hole which was rather more than an inch in
diameter, was made immediately beneath a branch which stretched out
almost horizontally from the main stem. It appeared merely a deeper
shadow upon the dark and mottled surface of the bark with which the
branches were covered, and could not be detected by the eye until one
was within a few feet of it. The young chirped vociferously as I
approached the nest, thinking it was the old one with food; but the
clamor suddenly ceased as I put my hand on that part of the trunk in
which they were concealed, the unusual jarring and rustling alarming
them into silence. The cavity, which was about fifteen inches deep,
was gourd-shaped, and was wrought with great skill and regularity. The
walls were quite smooth and clean and new.

[Illustration: WOODPECKER'S NEST. (Dotted lines indicate inside of
nest and eggs).]

I shall never forget the circumstance of observing a pair of
yellow-bellied woodpeckers,--the most rare and secluded, and, next to
the red-headed, the most beautiful species found in our
woods,--breeding in an old, truncated beech in the Beaverkill
Mountains, an off-shoot of the Catskills. We had been travelling,
three of us, all day in search of a trout lake, which lay far in among
the mountains, had twice lost our course in the trackless forest,
and, weary and hungry, had sat down to rest upon a decayed log. The
chattering of the young, and the passing to and fro of the parent
birds, soon arrested my attention. The entrance to the nest was on the
east side of the tree, about twenty-five feet from the ground. At
intervals of scarcely a minute, the old birds, one after another,
would light upon the edge of the hole with a grub or worm in their
beaks; then each in turn would make a bow or two, cast an eye quickly
around, and by a single movement place itself in the neck