Another homespun name in extensive use is _Cock-of-the-woods_; yet another is _Wood-cock_. This last is suitable enough, but it leads obviously to confusion. Accordingly, within the range of the true woodcock (_Philohela minor_), the woodpecker is commonly distinguished as the “black woodcock.” Other appellatives that have been picked up here and there and gathered in the books are “black woodpecker,” “English woodpecker,” “black log,” “king-of-the-woods,” “stump breaker”; and, because of its cackling cry, “wood-hen,” “Indian-hen,” “laughing woodpecker,” “johnny-cock,” “wood-chuck,” and “cluck-cock.” (The last, given by Scoville, 1920, as current in Juniata County, Pa., is, perhaps, an assimilation from the Pennsylvania Dutch.) The subspecific name _abieticola_ (= dweller amid fir trees) is in some degree misleading, for, in the Northeastern States at least, the bird is commonly found in forests of mingled conifers and hardwoods; it shows no partiality to firs, nor even to conifers generally; and it cuts its nesting cavities, in the large majority of cases, in the dead and standing trunks of deciduous trees. In the Rocky Mountains, however, according to the Weydemeyers (1928), it prefers growths of larch, yellow pine, and Douglas fir. It is a denizen of extensive forests. It will adapt itself to second growth--particularly where the young trees have sprung up about some remnant of the old; but in any case it requires wide areas. As forests dwindle to woodlots, along with the wild turkey, the barred owl, and the raven, it disappears. From regions once forested but now devoted to agriculture it is gone; in the mountains, however, in the marginal areas, where wooded ridges extend out to the plains, and in forested swamp lands, it continues. In such territories, indeed, its numbers during the past 50 years have increased, and it has reappeared in localities once deserted. Reports of such recrudescence are many, and they come from widely scattered places, particularly in the States to eastward of the Mississippi River.