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    The Woodpeckers
    The Woodpeckers
    The Woodpeckers
    Ebook179 pages1 hour

    The Woodpeckers

    By Fannie Hardy Eckstorm

    ()

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    The Woodpeckers
    Author

    Fannie Hardy Eckstorm

    Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm (1865-1946) was an American writer, ornithologist and folklorist. Her extensive personal knowledge of her native state of Maine secured her place as one of the foremost authorities on the history, wildlife, cultures, and lore of the region. Born Fannie Pearson Hardy in Brewer, Maine, her father, Manly Hardy, was a fur trader, naturalist, and taxidermist. Her granduncle was painter Jeremiah Pearson Hardy. She attended Bangor High School, then was sent in the winter of 1883 to Abbot Academy, a college preparatory school in Andover, Massachusetts. She went on to Smith College and graduated in 1888, having founded the college chapter of the National Audubon Society. From 1889 to 1891, Hardy served as the superintendent of schools in Brewer, becoming the first woman to hold such a position in Maine. In 1891 she wrote a series of articles examining Maine game laws for Forest and Stream magazine. At the turn of the 20th Century, Eckstrom’s writing career began to gain momentum. She contributed to magazines such as Bird-Lore, the immediate predecessor of The Audubon Magazine, and the Auk, before publishing her first two books, The Bird Book and The Woodpeckers. Her next book, The Penobscot Man (1904) celebrates the lumbermen and river drivers that populated her childhood, and David Libbey: Penobscot Woodsman and River Driver (1907) creates an in-depth profile of one of those men. In 1908 Eckstorm founded Brewer’s public library while continuing to publish articles and critiques. She also contributed to Louis C. Hatch’s Maine, A History (1919), published Minstrelsy of Maine (1927) with Mary Winslow Smyth, and worked on British Ballads from Maine (1929) with Smyth and Phillips Barry. She also wrote prolifically on the language and culture of Maine’s Native Americans. Eckstorm was married to Reverend Jacob A. Eckstorm, and the couple had two children. She died on December 31, 1946 in Brewer, Maine.

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      Book preview

      The Woodpeckers - Fannie Hardy Eckstorm

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woodpeckers, by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: The Woodpeckers

      Author: Fannie Hardy Eckstorm

      Release Date: January 25, 2011 [EBook #35062]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOODPECKERS ***

      Produced by Bryan Ness, Steve Read and the Online

      Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This

      file was produced from images generously made available

      by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

      cover

      THE WOODPECKERS

      BY

      FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM

      WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

      BOSTON AND NEW YORK

      HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

      The Riverside Press, Cambridge

      1901

      COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

      To

      MY FATHER

      MR. MANLY HARDY

      A Lifelong Naturalist

      CONTENTS

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

      The colored illustrations are by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. The text cuts are from drawings by John L. Ridgway.

      THE WOODPECKERS

      FOREWORD: THE RIDDLERS

      Long ago in Greece, the legend runs, a terrible monster called the Sphinx used to waylay travelers to ask them riddles: whoever could not answer these she killed, but the man who did answer them killed her and made an end of her riddling.

      To-day there is no Sphinx to fear, yet the world is full of unguessed riddles. No thoughtful man can go far afield but some bird or flower or stone bars his way with a question demanding an answer; and though many men have been diligently spelling out the answers for many years, and we for the most part must study the answers they have proved, and must reply in their words, yet those shrewd old riddlers, the birds and flowers and bees, are always ready for a new victim, putting their heads together over some new enigma to bar the road to knowledge till that, too, shall be answered; so that other men’s learning does not always suffice. So much of a man’s pleasure in life, so much of his power, depends on his ability to silence these persistent questioners, that this little book was written with the hope of making clearer the kind of questions Dame Nature asks, and the way to get correct answers.

      This is purposely a little book, dealing only with a single group of birds, treating particularly only some of the commoner species of that group, taking up only a few of the problems that present themselves to the naturalist for solution, and aiming rather to make the reader acquainted with the birds than learned about them.

      The woodpeckers were selected in preference to any other family because they are patient under observation, easily identified, resident in all parts of the country both in summer and in winter, and because more than any other birds they leave behind them records of their work which may be studied after the birds have flown. The book provides ample means for identifying every species and subspecies of woodpecker known in North America, though only five of the commonest and most interesting species have been selected for special study. At least three of these five should be found in almost every part of the country. The Californian woodpecker is never seen in the East, nor the red-headed in the far West, but the downy and the hairy are resident nearly everywhere, and some species of the flickers and sapsuckers, if not always the ones chosen for special notice, are visitors in most localities.

      Look for the woodpeckers in orchards and along the edges of thickets, among tangles of wild grapes and in patches of low, wild berries, upon which they often feed, among dead trees and in the track of forest fires. Wherever there are boring larvæ, beetles, ants, grasshoppers, the fruit of poison-ivy, dogwood, june-berry, wild cherry or wild grapes, woodpeckers may be confidently looked for if there are any in the neighborhood. Be patient, persistent, wide-awake, sure that you see what you think you see, careful to remember what you have seen, studious to compare your observations, and keen to hear the questions propounded you. If you do this seven years and a day, you will earn the name of Naturalist; and if you travel the road of the naturalist with curious patience, you may some day become as famous a riddle-reader as was that OEdipus, the king of Thebes, who slew the Sphinx.

      I

      HOW TO KNOW A WOODPECKER

      The woodpecker is the easiest of all birds to recognize. Even if entirely new to you, you may readily decide whether a bird is a woodpecker or not.

      The woodpecker is always striking and is often gay in color. He is usually noisy, and his note is clear and characteristic. His shape and habits are peculiar, so that whenever you see a bird clinging to the side of a tree as if he had been thrown at it and stuck, you may safely call him a woodpecker. Not that all birds which cling to the bark of trees are woodpeckers,—for the chickadees, the crested titmice, the nuthatches, the brown creepers, and a few others like the kinglets and some wrens and wood-warblers more or less habitually climb up and down the tree-trunks; but these do it with a pretty grace wholly unlike the woodpecker’s awkward, cling-fast way of holding on. As the largest of these is smaller than the smallest woodpecker, and as none of them (excepting only the tiny kinglets) ever shows the patch of yellow or scarlet which always marks the head of the male woodpecker, and which sometimes adorns his mate, there is no danger of making mistakes.

      The nuthatches are the only birds likely to be confused with woodpeckers, and these have the peculiar habit of traveling down a tree-trunk with their heads pointing to the ground. A woodpecker never does this; he may move down the trunk of the tree he is working on, but he will do it by hopping backward. A still surer sign of the woodpecker is the way he sits upon his tail, using it to brace him. No other birds except the chimney swift and the little brown creeper ever do this. A sure mark, also, is his feet, which have two toes turned forward and two turned backward. We find this arrangement in no other North American birds except the cuckoos and our one native parroquet. However, there is one small group of woodpeckers which have but three toes, and these are the only North American land-birds that do not have four well-developed toes.

      In coloration the woodpeckers show a strong family likeness. Except in some young birds, the color is always brilliant and often is gaudy. Usually it shows much clear black and white, with dashes of scarlet or yellow about the head. Sometimes the colors are solid, as in the red-headed woodpecker; sometimes they lie in close bars, as in the red-bellied species; sometimes in spots and stripes, as in the downy and hairy; but there is always a contrast, never any blending of hues. The red or yellow is laid on in well-defined patches—square, oblong, or crescentic—upon the crown, the nape, the jaws, or the throat; or else in stripes or

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