f man, in no way changing their habits
so as to take advantage of his presence in nature. The pine grosbeaks
will come in numbers upon your porch to get the black drupes of the
honeysuckle or the woodbine, or within reach of your windows to get
the berries of the mountain-ash, but they know you not; they look at
you as innocently and unconcernedly as at a bear or moose in their
native north, and your house is no more to them than a ledge of rocks.

The only ones of my winter neighbors that actually rap at my door are
the nuthatches and woodpeckers, and these do not know that it is my
door. My retreat is covered with the bark of young chestnut-trees, and
the birds, I suspect, mistake it for a huge stump that ought to hold
fat grubs (there is not even a book-worm inside of it), and their loud
rapping often makes me think I have a caller indeed. I place fragments
of hickory-nuts in the interstices of the bark, and thus attract the
nuthatches; a bone upon my window-sill attracts both nuthatches and
the downy woodpecker. They peep in curiously through the window upon
me, pecking away at my bone, too often a very poor one. A bone nailed
to a tree a few feet in front of the window attracts crows as well as
lesser birds. Even the slate-colored snowbird, a seed-eater, comes and
nibbles it occasionally.

The bird that seems to consider he has the best right to the bone both
upon the tree and upon the sill is the downy woodpecker, my favorite
neighbor among the winter birds, to whom I will mainly devote the
remainder of this chapter. His retreat is but a few paces from my own,
in the decayed limb of an apple-tree which he excavated several
autumns ago. I say "he" because the red plume on the top of his head
proclaims the sex. It seems not to be generally known to our writers
upon ornithology that certain of our woodpeckers--probably all the
winter residents--each fall excavate a limb or the trunk of a tree in
which to pass the winter, and that the cavity is abandoned in the
spring, probably for a new one in which nidification takes place. So
far as I have observed, these cavities are drilled out only by the
males. Where the females take up their quarters I am not so well
informed, though I suspect that they use the abandoned holes of the
males of the previous year.

The particular woodpecker to which I refer drilled his first hole in
my apple-tree one fall four or five years ago. This he occupied till
the following spring, when