A. Dawes DuBois says in his notes: “I have seen a downy woodpecker industriously applying the percussion test to the dried stalks of the previous summer’s horse weeds, which grow to prodigious size in the creek bottoms near Springfield, Illinois. He went up each stalk, tapping it lightly, and frequently stopping to pierce the shell and extract a worm from the pith. I found that the weed stems he had visited were punctured and splintered in numerous places.” The following note by Elliott R. Tibbets (1911) shows how agile the downy is on the wing. He was watching some birds at a feeding shelf. “I was told,” he says, “to throw a cracked nut into the air and see what followed--I did so, and, to my surprise, the Downy darted after it, not allowing it to touch the ground, and then returned to the evergreen, where he proceeded to pick the kernel from the hard shell.” Henry D. Minot (1877) also mentions that they “catch insects on the wing.” _Behavior._--The downy woodpecker sits very still as it digs out a grub from under the bark of a tree, or from the wood under the bark, or as it dislodges a bit of bark in its hunt for a cocoon or a bundle of insects’ eggs. We hear the gentle taps of its bill, and when our eyes, led by the sound, catch sight of the bird, perched on a branch or the trunk of a tree, we understand why it has been called industrious. It is concentrated on its work; it works patiently, seriously, like a carpenter working earnestly with his chisel, spending a full minute, sometimes more, to secure a bit of food. As it sits there quietly, working painstakingly at the bark, it gives the impression of a rather sedentary bird, deliberate and staid, but when it begins to move about--taking short flights among the branches--alighting on little swaying twigs and flitting off again--we see it in another mood. It is lively now; all deliberateness is gone. It hops upward over the branches with quick jerky hops, rearing back a little after each one; it may descend a little way by backward hitches; it winds about the smaller branches, peering at the right side, the left side, and around at the back; it flits to a twig no thicker than a pencil for the space of a single peck, and then is off with the speed of an arrow, weaving and undulating through a maze of branchlets, cutting the air audibly with its wings. We can watch the downy woodpecker best in winter when the trees and shrubs are bare. But even in such an exposed situation as a leafless tree, we do not find it a conspicuous bird--one hop and it is hidden behind a branch, seeming almost to glide out of our sight. At the slightest alarm it disappears; it uses a branch as a shield--slipping behind it, safe from observation or attack.