Page:The Common Birds of Bombay.djvu/75

Rh, they darted off in quest of something more promising.

Our one Woodpecker is a little bird, scarcely bigger than a bulbul, but more stoutly built. It is the Yellow-fronted Woodpecker of Jerdon (Picus mahrattensis), a striking and beautifully coloured bird. The head is bright yellowish brown, or brownish yellow, the crown of the male being adorned with a scarlet crest. The throat is white and so are the sides of the face and neck. This gives a peculiar piquancy to the sharp countenance of the keen little bird. The shoulders, wings, and tail are black, speckled with white, but the lower part of the back is pure white. It wears a "stomacher" of bright scarlet, but this you will not see unless you have the bird in your hand. Like most of its kind, it generally goes in pairs, one following the other from tree to tree, with short, sharp, impatient cries. They lay their eggs, from February to March, in a deep hole in some dead branch of a tree. Of course they make the hole themselves, working like navvies. The Red Woodpecker (Micropternus gularis), having rather a weak bill, saves itself this labour by burrowing into the nests of tree ants, and brings up its family among them. Nobody has yet discovered how it "squares" the vicious little ants. We in the same situation would be bitten to death in half an hour. This species is common in the country round about, and is very likely to be found in Bombay, but I have not seen it. The great Golden Back (Brachypternus aurantius) may occasionally visit us too.

When a native Coppersmith has roughly shaped out a kettle, or handy, the next thing he does is to put it