This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ...plants are so generally found growing around the bases of trees. The Flicker, although one of the woodpeckers, has habits quite different from the majority of its tribe. Instead of drilling holes in trees for a living, it gets most of its food from the ground. Its structure, especially that of its bill, is ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ...plants are so generally found growing around the bases of trees. The Flicker, although one of the woodpeckers, has habits quite different from the majority of its tribe. Instead of drilling holes in trees for a living, it gets most of its food from the ground. Its structure, especially that of its bill, is modified to suit its peculiar habits. The ordinary woodpecker's bill is shaped like a chisel at the tip, but that of a flicker is like a pickaxe. It has the same long, extensile tongue which characterizes most of the woodpeckers. This is used for catching small insects, by being thrust out covered with sticky saliva and entangling them. Larger insects are grasped by the bill. Flickers relish fruit as much as robins do. The two species are usually associated when the berries of the sour-gum and black-cherry trees are ripe. In winter flickers eat the berries of Ampelopsis. Nearly half the flickers' diet consists of ants. HEAD OF FLICKER. In two hundred and thirty stomachs examined at Washington fifty-six per cent. was animal matter, thirty-nine per cent. vegetable, and five per cent. mineral. Two of them contained over three thousand ants each. Other insects were beetles (Coleoptera), bugs (Hemiptera), grasshoppers and crickets (Orthoptera), caterpillars (Lepidoptera), May-flies (Ephemerida), and white ants (Isoptera). In 1860 a writer in the Southern Planter stated that flickers were the only birds he had ever seen pulling out worms from the roots of peach-trees, --referring evidently to the destructive peach-tree borer. The Red-headed Woodpecker is another species that, like the flicker, has got above hard work. Instead of delving in wood, he sits on a post or a telegraph-pole or similar point of vantage, taking beetles, grasshoppers, and other...
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