For Young Observers
My Experience with a Red-headed Woodpecker
BY ALICK WETMORE (age, 13 years). North Freedom. Wis.
THE first time that I saw the subject of this sketch was on Sunday, October 8, i8gg. As I was going along a ravine on that da}^ I heard a loud, tree -toad- like ker - r-r -ruck coming from the top of a tall dead stub. I looked up and soon saw that the owner of the voice was a young Red-headed Woodpecker. His (?) head was a dusky color. He would stick his head around the tree and, after giving the note, dodge back. I thought I would keep a sharp eye on him, and a little while afterward I was rewarded by seeing him get an acorn from a small oak. He seemed to be storing acorns up for winter in holes and crannies. Once he lit on an oak limb that would not bear him, and it swung until he hung back down, but he got his acorn. While he was flying off, a little Junco seemed to think that he was trespassing and flew at him in a rage and made him get out of the way. I went to a stump nearby and got an acorn and found that it was whole. A few marks on the shell showed where he had hammered it into the crevice. He always seemed to go to the same tree for his acorns. I laid down on the bank of the ravine close to the tree in the sun to watch him, but he was suspicious and would not come near at first. I was rather surprised to see that he could easily go down a tree backwards, lifting his tail and, after hopping down, falling back onto it. Everywhere he went, he expressed, in vigorous notes, his disgust at having me around. The stub he liked best was very tall and had a crack in it near the top, and into this crack he hammered, with his shiny white bill, all the acorns that he possibly could. Some of them he cracked in two and then put them in the crack. One fragment he dropped as he lighted. He was after it quick as a flash, and chased it so near the ground that I thought he would dash himself onto it and be killed, but he turned up just before he reached it and flew off with- out the acorn. In a cornfield a short distance away I found some nubbins for him. While I was looking for a place to put them up, I found a hole with sixteen acorns in it. He had put them there, for I could
see the marks of his bill on them and around the edges of the hole
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