North America has a large population of woodpeckers, including the biggest and finest one in the world. This is the great ivory-bill--twenty inches in length, and jet-black, with white wing-tips, a grand scarlet topknot, and a beak like an ivory pickax. It used to be abundant all over the Southern States, but now is nearly extinct. Almost as fine, and still frequently seen all over the eastern parts of the United States and Canada, is the similar but smaller logcock, or pileated woodpecker, as it is named in the books, whose shrill scream may be heard half a mile. Most of our familiar woodpeckers, however, are much smaller, and their plumage is a checker of black and white. Everywhere common in town, as well as among the farmlands, are three or four species, of which the most often seen, and the smallest, is the downy woodpecker, which gets its name from the broad stripe of soft white feathers up and down the middle of its back. It is not so large as a sparrow, and haunts the woods, the farmer's orchards, the shade-trees along the rural roads or beside the streets of our villages, and often makes itself a welcome visitor to the city parks and gardens. From morning till night, and all the year round, it scrambles up and down the trunks of the trees and round and round their branches, cleverly finding and dragging out insects or their young concealed under the scales of the bark; and though it digs many pits none is deep enough to injure the tree, as the only woodpecker which digs deep enough to do harm is the yellow-bellied one, which appears only in the spring, going far north to breed, and which country people call the sapsucker. The downy and its relatives, on the other hand, are doing good every day. Especially welcome is this active little visitor in winter, often with such small companions as the chickadee and nuthatch, when birds, or any other sort of living things are scarce, and we are longing for their return. If you sit down for awhile at the foot of a tree, and keep very still indeed, without moving even so much as a finger, it will very likely come and sit on the trunk of another tree close by and begin to peck away with its long, sharp beak in search of insects. How it makes the chips fly! Its beak is just like a chisel, and when the bird finds that a beetle or a grub has burrowed into the trunk, it does not take very long to dig it out. And it also has an extremely odd tongue, which is very long and slender, and very sticky, and has a curious tip. By means of this tongue the bird can often drag an insect out of its burrow without being obliged to dig right down to it.