Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/358

342 New Hampshire, where it is almost exclusively known by that name. He is evidently a bird of a good deal of intelligence, though undeniably cranky at times. He is quick to know where he is not molested, and, once he has convinced himself that the surroundings are not likely to prove dangerous, will take up his abode perhaps in an apple tree a few yards from the house, and will return summer after summer as long as he is allowed to remain in possession. For the last ten or fifteen years, perhaps longer, a pair have nested in this manner in an apple tree on the farm where I write, and have succeeded in bringing up a promising brood each season without serious mishap. When the tree they formerly occupied was cut down, they merely moved to another still nearer the house, and made their hole in a large branch hardly a dozen feet from the ground. They were obliged to through the green sapwood at first, and then through a inches of dry but extremely hard wood beneath, before reaching the decayed heart of the branch, but their bills were equal to the task, and they soon had a gourd-shaped cavern some eighteen inches in depth, with the doorway opening to the south. They seldom exhibit much impatience about going to housekeeping each spring, and it is usually pretty well along in May before they have done their spring house-cleaning. This consists merely in clearing out the bottom of the hole and perhaps enlarging it slightly. There is nothing that really deserves the name of nest, the eggs being laid on the rotten wood or loose chips at the bottom, after the manner of the woodpeckers.

The birds are rather quiet, but not at all timid during the nesting season, coming and going at all hours of the day, quite regardless as to whether any one is watching them or not. But soon after the eggs are hatched there may be heard a low murmur issuing from the opening of the nest, which increases in loudness day by day until it is a murmur no longer, but a kind of stifled crying and squalling, which rises to a chorus of shrieks on the arrival of the old birds, or, in