Craig S. Thoms (1927), in a study of the nesting habits in South Dakota, says: “On June 9 the young were beginning to come up to the door of their excavation to receive food. Presumably the largest and strongest sticks his head clear out. When he fed he subsided and the next came up, but not quite so far. He in his turn subsided and the parent entered to feed the weaker ones still farther down. * * * “On June 12 the last of the young left the nest, which upon being measured was found to be 10 inches deep.” A. Dawes DuBois (MS.) tells of the flight of the young birds from the nest: “The young chattered most of the time during the last two days of nest life. One at a time they looked out a great deal at the strange outer world. They left the nest on June 11. The last two, a male and a female, left during the afternoon, each after being fed at the entrance and seeing the parent fly away. The young male flew from the nest hole straight to a tree 60 feet away. His sister quickly followed, lighting on the trunk of the same tree and following her parent up the hole in the hitching manner of their kind as though she had been practicing this vertical locomotion all her life.” _Plumages._--[AUTHOR’S NOTE: Young downy woodpeckers are hatched naked and blind, but the juvenal plumage is acquired before the young leave the nest. In this first plumage, the young male is much like the adult male, except that the red nuchal patch is lacking; the forehead is black, spotted with white, but the crown and occiput are more or less marked with various shades of red, pinkish, or yellowish, as well as spotted with white; the black portions of the plumage are duller than in the adult; the sides of the breast are streaked and the flanks obscurely spotted with dusky; the white areas, underparts, and white spots elsewhere, as well as the rectrices, are tinged with yellowish. The young female is like the young male, except that there is no red on the head, and the crown is clear black, or black spotted with white. L. L. Snyder (1923) has shown that young males sometimes have only white markings on a black crown and that young females sometimes have reddish, pinkish, or yellowish markings on the crown. The juvenal plumage is worn but a short time, for a complete molt, beginning in September or earlier, produces a first winter plumage, which is practically adult. Adults have a complete annual molt from July to September. Both adults and young show a tinge of yellowish in the white areas in fresh fall plumage, which gradually fades away.] _Food._--F. E. L. Beal (1911) in an examination of the contents of 723 stomachs of the downy woodpecker found that 76.05 percent was animal matter, the remaining 23.95 percent vegetable matter. The following quotations are from his exhaustive report.