I noticed four woodpeckers in league against one squirrel, driving the poor fellow out of an oak that they claimed.

This has been perfected by many stages, and I have now before me a splendid specimen of the most improved patternnamely, the bill of the great black woodpecker of Western India, a bird nearly as big as a crow.

And the Flicker, the big Woodpecker with golden lining to its wings, for it was he, gave out peal after peal of his jolly call-note.

It was a warm afternoon, and the air was calm; not a breath stirred the leaves on the old trees around us; the forest sounds were hushed, save the tap of the woodpecker on his hollow tree, or an occasional drumming of a partridge on his log.

I do not know why we have so few green woodpeckers by the river, as there are plenty of old trees there; but these birds, which feed chiefly on the ground among the anthills, have a marked preference for such woods in the neighbourhood as contain an abundance of oak trees.

The steady tapping was a woodpecker at work upon an old tree.

The Tamanaquas of South America have a tradition that the human race sprang from the fruits of the date palm after the Mexican age of water.[20] Again, our English nursery fable of the parsley-bed, in which little strangers are discovered, is perhaps, "A remnant of a fuller tradition, like that of the woodpecker among the Romans, and that of the stork among our Continental kinsmen."

Everything went splendidly till a typhoon hit us amidships and sent us careening, blind, battered and soaked into this red and white refuge of a hotel, that clings to the side of a mountain like a woodpecker to a telephone pole.

The species whose dried stalks are used by the woodpeckers for their winter storage was cultivated at Key West, Florida, during several years before 1858.