Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/153

Rh eventually reared on such soft food as liver (generally chopped up), German-paste, and fruit not too hard, and became very tame, readily coming to the hand which fed it, darting out its long tongue directly anything was presented, as well as drinking with it, and climbing up me as if I was a tree. Its tongue was repeatedly protruded about three inches beyond the tip of the beak, and when it came out it could be seen to vibrate rapidly—so rapidly that at a distance of a few feet the motion was imperceptible. At the end of the tongue there is a glutinous secretion, very noticeable whenever my finger was licked by the bird—a secretion to which it is said the ants adhere. The tip of the tongue had also three hair-like barbs on either side, projecting backwards, which would no doubt also assist in the capture of these insects.

At the end of forty days from the date when I opined our Woodpecker to have been hatched, it was a splendid bird, full-winged and full-grown (the eye and skin round the eye greyish brown), but with an awkward habit of standing with its legs apart, which made us afraid it would break them, as two Greater Spotted Woodpeckers which belonged to a friend had done. As it could now feed itself, it was often put on the grass, but, having made its way to a large oak, it ascended with oblique jerkings, almost beyond the reach of a long ladder; after this it was again condemned to a cage, or we should have lost it; and, I am sorry to say, a Rat eventually killed it.

The usual height of a Green Woodpecker's hole in Norfolk—taking the average of some hundred—is about twenty feet, and the