Seated under a cluster of small maples, one day in early May, I watched the interesting courting antics of the pair. The jaunty male’s favorite position was one in which he appeared to be almost standing on his tail. With bill upright, wings thrown forward, and tail wide-spread he repeated over and over what was undoubtedly intended for a love-song, a series of notes divided between chuckles and whistles. But the strangest, most mystifying performance was a series of backward drops on the under side of a limb inclined about forty-five degrees. * * * Why didn’t the little acrobat fall when he released his claws? Studying his movements carefully through the binoculars, I came to the conclusion that at the instant of releasing his grip he jerked his body toward the limb with sufficient impetus to catch the bark six inches or so below. Lewis O. Shelley says in his notes: “I have watched the act of copulation of the hairy woodpecker and noted its dissimilarity to the downy. For the hairy invariably instills a follow-up procedure to the display, the male coming to her call and, soon thereafter, hopping up the branch toward her with a short jerking movement, in which he calls _wick-up, wick-up, wick-up_, wings agitating, this immediately followed by copulation.” _Nesting._--The hairy woodpecker is rather rare, as a breeding bird, in my home territory in southeastern Massachusetts, but I have the records of 12 local nests. It shows a decided preference for deciduous woodlands, six of the nests being in dry, upland woods and two in maple swamps; of the other four nests, three were in apple orchards, close to extensive woodlots, and the fourth was in a small, living, red maple in a swampy meadow, some distance from any woods. The birds showed no decided preference for any one species of tree; three nests each were found in maples and apple trees, two each in chestnuts and poplars, and one each in a dead oak and a dead beech. Only four nests were in dead trees or dead branches; the others were all in living hardwoods. The heights from the ground varied from 5 feet in a dead poplar stub to 30 feet, or more, in tall chestnuts or maples. The entrance to the nesting cavity often appears nearly, or quite, circular, but on careful measurement will usually be shown to be more or less elliptical, higher than broad; a typical entrance hole that I measured was 1⅞ high by 1½ inches wide. The depth of the cavity was found to vary from 10 to 12 inches, but Mr. Shelley (1933) measured one that was 15 inches deep, and even deeper holes have been reported. Owen Durfee’s notes give some very careful measurements of two of our local nests, one of which is worth quoting as showing an unusually elliptical entrance: “The entrance to the nest was on the northeast side of the trunk of a live chestnut and 22½ feet from the ground. The tree leaned toward the east about 2 feet.