During the autumn the scattered pairs for several miles around usually congregate in some suitable wood, containing a plenty of beech-trees, and here spend the long cold winter in company, chattering and chasing one another about among the trees to keep warm, and to help while away the time. “Coe’s woods,” in this immediate vicinity, has long been famous as the great winter resort for the red-headed woodpeckers of the neighborhood, and it is certainly the most suitable place for their purposes to be found for many miles around. This piece of woods, not over an eighth of a mile in extent, contains, besides hundreds of beeches (_Fagus ferruginea_), a large number of elms (_Ulmus americana_), and white ash-trees (_Fraxinus americana_) of great size, most of the tops of which are now dead. What more favorable location than this woods could a woodpecker desire? Here they have beechnuts in abundance and a bountiful supply of dead limbs and tree-tops far above the reach of the small charges commonly used by bird-collectors. James B. Purdy (1900) says that “the presence of the Red-headed Woodpecker (_Melanerpes erythrocephalus_) during the winter months in Michigan does not depend upon the temperature, but entirely upon the food supply, viz.: the crop of acorns and beechnuts which precedes the winter. If these nuts are plenty, the red-headed woodpeckers will always be found during the winter months, but in no great abundance. If there are no acorns or beechnuts, this bird will be entirely absent in our Michigan forests.” Robert Ridgway (1881) writes: Ordinarily this species (_Melanerpes erythrocephalus_) is decidedly the most numerous of the Woodpeckers in Southeastern Illinois, while during the winter season it is often so excessively common in the sheltered bottom-lands as to outnumber all other species together, and, in fact, is voted a decided nuisance by the hunter, sportsman, or collector, on account of its well known habit of following any one carrying a gun, and annoying him by its continued chatter; at intervals sweeping before him and thus diverting attention. Being at this season always semi-gregarious, while they are of all woodpeckers the most restless and sportive, the annoyance which they thus cause is really no trifling matter.