old one with food; but the
clamor suddenly ceased as I put my hand on that part of the trunk in
which they were concealed, the unusual jarring and rustling alarming
them into silence. The cavity, which was about fifteen inches deep,
was gourd-shaped, and was wrought out with great skill and regularity.
The walls were quite smooth and clean and new.

I shall never forget the circumstances of observing a pair of
yellow-bellied woodpeckers--the most rare and secluded, and, nest to
the red-headed, the most beautiful species found in our
woods--breeding in an old, truncated beech in the Beaverkill
Mountains, on offshoot of the Catskills. We had been traveling, three
of us, all day in search of a trout lake, which lay far in among the
mountains, had twice lost our course in the trackless forest, and,
weary and hungry, had sat down to rest upon a decayed log. The
chattering of the young, and the passing to and fro of the parent
birds, soon arrested my attention. The entrance to the nest was on the
east side of the tree, about twenty-five feet from the ground. At
intervals of scarcely a minute, the old birds, one after the other,
would alight upon the edge of the hole with a grub or worm in their
beaks; then each in turn would make a bow or two, cast an eye quickly
around, and by a single movement place itself in the neck of the
passage. Here it would pause a moment, as if to determine in which
expectant mouth to place the morsel, and then disappear within. In
about half a minute, during which time that chattering of the young
gradually subsided, the bird would again emerge, but this time bearing
in its beak the ordure of one of the helpless family. Flying away very
slowly with head lowered and extended, as if anxious to hold the
offensive object as far from its plumage as possible, the bird dropped
the unsavory morsel in the course of a few yards, and, alighting on a
tree, wiped its bill on the bark and moss. This seems to be the order
all day,--carrying in and carrying out. I watched the birds for an
hour, while my companions were taking their turns in exploring the lay
of the land around us, and noted no variation in the programme. It
would be curious to know if the young are fed and waited upon in
regular order, and how, amid the darkness and the crowded state of the
apartment, the matter is so neatly managed. But ornithologists are all
silent upon the subject.

This practice of the birds is not so uncommon as it might at