And yet again, on September 21, I watched for many minutes an adult female feeding on a charred and decayed stump that remained in a young forest of jack pines. She was perched about a foot from the ground. Her method was by deliberate and swinging blows to break away platelike fragments of still firm wood, and then to intrude her bill and search with her tongue (as was evident) the opened cavity. This licking was always, or nearly always, upward, and often the head was turned, crown inward, throat outward. A jay might call or some other forest sound be heard, and the bird would pause, listen for an instant, and then resume her work. A day or two later I visited the stump and with my knife made an incision in it, and I found it to be the home of a colony of ants--not of the large _Camponotus_ but of a smaller, wine-black species about a quarter of an inch long. The body of the stump was honeycombed with their galleries. Of the major wintertime operations Vickers (1910) has written: Like the flicker, the [pileated woodpecker] is a great lover of ants, which accordingly occupy a large place in his bill-of-fare. So, to dine on the big black timber ants, which are his special delight, he drives holes to the very heart of growing forest trees, tapping the central chamber of the colony, where, in winter, he finds the dormant swarm unable to move and feasts upon them at leisure.... And the Log-cock makes no mistakes, though man might find no outward sign of an ant-tree. Doubtless that strong formic smell, coupled with his experience in sounding tree trunks,--as a man tells a ripe watermelon by the _plunk_ of it,--enables him not only to find the tree, but, what is more remarkable, to drive his hole with such precision that he taps the heart of the community. O. M. Bryens (1926) wrote from St. Joseph County, Mich.: On February 16, 1925, I was able to approach within twelve feet of one of these Woodpeckers busily engaged in digging in a maple stub, two feet in diameter and about twelve feet high. He was after insects whose borings I found later upon examining the wood. I watched him for about an hour.