The gold-winged woodpecker is a lively bird, most interesting to know. He makes so many strange noises that I can't tell you half of them, and his ways are as queer as his notes. He does not sing much, but he is a great drummer. When he finds a tin roof, or eaves gutter that pleases him, he will drum on it till he drives the family nearly crazy. He seems particularly to delight in waking them all up in the morning. He can sing, too. I have heard a flicker sing a droll little song, not very loud, swinging his body from side to side as he did it. Another thing this bird can do is dance. Two flickers will stand opposite one another and take funny little steps, forward and back, and sideways. Then they will touch their bills together and go through several graceful figures. This has been seen several times by persons whose truthfulness can be relied upon. The RED-HEADED WOODPECKER is another common one of the family, especially in the Middle States. He is a little smaller than the flicker. No one can mistake this bird, he is so plainly marked. His whole head is bright red. The rest of him is black, or bluish black, with a large mass of white on the body and wings. This woodpecker, too, has partly given up getting food from under the bark. He takes a good deal on the wing, like a flycatcher. Sometimes he goes to the ground for a large insect like a cricket or grasshopper, and he is fond of nuts, especially the little three-cornered beech-nut. The red-head is beginning to store food for winter use, for most woodpeckers do not migrate. When beech-nuts are ripe, he gets great quantities of them, and packs them away in queer places, where he can find them when he wants them. Some of his nuts the red-head puts in cavities in trees, others in knot-holes or under bark that is loose. Many he fits into cracks in the bark, and hammers in tight. He has been known to fill the cracks in a gate-post, and in railroad ties, and even to poke his nuts between the shingles on a roof. Any place where he can wedge a nut in he seems to think is a good one. [Illustration: DOWNY WOODPECKER] A woodpecker can eat almost anything. Besides insects and nuts, he likes wild berries of all kinds--dogwood, cedar, and others that he finds in the woods. The nest of the red-headed woodpecker is usually cut out in the dead top or limb of a tree. In prairie lands, where trees are scarce, he contents himself with telegraph-poles and fence-posts. This bird is rather a dainty feeder. He does not swallow his food wherever he finds it, as many birds do. He likes a regular dining-table. So he takes it to some place on top of a fence-post or an old stump, where he has found or made a little hollow. There he puts his nut or acorn, picks it to pieces, and eats it in bits.