“Woodpeckers spend their lives running around tree trunks from top to bottom in order to start the old bark that shelters insects, and exploring all fissures with their long, pointed tongue, which is pushed down into every hole where worms may possibly be hiding. These birds are placed in our forests as keepers. They inspect sickly trees in particular, trees honeycombed by vermin, and they examine carefully the diseased parts. Occasionally they may chance to attack a healthy part, especially in making their nests, and they may thus injure the tree by drilling into the live wood. But this damage is more than atoned for in the long run, and so I do not hesitate to bestow upon our woodpeckers the title of forest-preservers, a title earned by their assiduous warfare on insects injurious to wood. Seldom do they leave their timber-yard—the trunk and the main branches of the tree—and descend to the ground, except when they chance to find an ant-hill, the inmates of which they devour with delight. They place their nests at a considerable height from the ground, deep down in a round hole bored with the beak in the heart of some tree trunk. The bedding consists of moss and wool, and the eggs, four to six in number, are in every instance white, smooth, and as lustrous as ivory.” CHAPTER XXIII MORE ABOUT WOODPECKERS “The commonest of our woodpeckers is the green woodpecker, which is about as large as a turtle-dove. Its plumage has a richness rarely seen in that of any of our other birds. The top of the head and the nape of the neck are of a magnificent crimson; two mustaches of the same hue adorn the bird’s face; the back is green, the breast and stomach yellowish white, the rump yellow, and the large wing-feathers black with regular marks of white on the edge. The female has less brilliant coloring than the male and its mustaches are black instead of red.