- Eggs:
- 5, clear white, but, according to Samuels, owing to their transparency, they have a pink tint before they are blown.
- Range:
- Middle portion of the eastern United States from the Atlantic coast to the Great Plains.
The Hairy Woodpecker is a common bird in wooded regions, especially where partly decayed trees have been left standing. Its creeping motion when scanning tree trunks for insects resembles that of the Black-and-white Warbler. Though it is abundant, it is shy in the breeding-season and keeps to secluded woodlands, but in the fall and winter comes freely to orchards and about houses. It has an affection for particular trees and often uses the same tree, if not perhaps the same hole, for several successive seasons.
Eight years ago I noticed this species in May in Samp-Mortar woods, a wild, rocky place, covered with laurel and abounding in the rarer ferns. From the crest of Mortar Rock I could look into the top of a tall hickory, in which a Hairy Woodpecker was boring. A few years later, at the same season, I found a similar bird nesting in the same tree and there were three holes visible in the trunk. This year I went to the place early in June. The tree was entirely dead and branchless from winter storms, the top had crumbled away so that light came through the upper holes, there were five apertures in all, and from the lowest of these flew a Hairy Woodpecker, and when I beat on the tree with a stick the clamouring inside told that the young were hatched.
On seeing me the bird went into one of the empty holes and then flew to a little distance and, joined by the male, refused to go near the nest while I remained. The tree was so shaky that it swayed with every breeze, and it is the last year that it will shelter its black-and-white tenants. The red head hand is not very conspieuous in this Woodpecker unless you look at it from above or catch a glimpse of it when the bird is going up the tree trunk
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