_Plumages._--As with other woodpeckers, the young are hatched naked and blind, but the juvenal plumage is acquired before the young bird leaves the nest. The juvenal plumage is much like that of the adult but duller, and the bill is shorter and weaker; the contour plumage is softer and looser; the lower parts are brownish black instead of clear black, and the back is only a little darker; the white in the primaries is more restricted. In the young male, the posterior half of the crown is largely “vermilion” or “salmon orange”; these reddish colors are much reduced or entirely absent in the young female. Ridgway (1914) says that the feathers of the hind neck and underparts are sometimes, perhaps on younger birds than I have seen, “indistinctly and narrowly margined at tip with grayish, and the hindneck sometimes indistinctly spotted with whitish.” By the middle of September this juvenal plumage, including the wings and tail, has been replaced by the first winter plumage, which is like that of the adult, except for somewhat less white in the primaries. Adults have a complete annual molt, which begins in July and is generally completed before the end of September. _Food._--The white-headed woodpecker forages for its food mainly, if not entirely, on the trunks and branches of coniferous trees, living or dead. Mr. Skinner writes to me that he has seen it feeding on the trunks of sequoias, sugar pines, and Douglas firs, searching most diligently and thoroughly in the crevices in the bark for insects and their eggs; it generally begins low down on the tree and progresses upward, working pretty well up to the top of the tree before flying off; occasionally, one has worked horizontally around a tree trunk, but not downward. Dr. J. C. Merrill (1888) describes its method of feeding very well, as follows: So far as I have observed, and during the winter I watched it carefully, its principal supply of food is obtained in the bark, most of the pines having a very rough bark, scaly and deeply fissured. The bird uses its bill as a crowbar rather than as a hammer or chisel, _prying_ off the successive scales and layers of bark in a very characteristic way. This explains the fact of its being such a quiet worker, and as would be expected it is most often seen near the base of the tree where the bark is thickest and roughest. It must destroy immense numbers of Scolytidae, whose larvae tunnel the bark so extensively, and of other insects that crawl beneath the scales of bark for shelter during winter. I have several times imitated the work of this bird by prying off the successive layers of bark, and have been astonished at the great numbers of insects, and especially of spiders, so exposed.