The other species have the same habit of drumming on one tree. I have noticed it in the small spotted, or banded, woodpecker; and have observed that invariably after he has drummed two or three times the female has come flying to him from some other part of the wood, and the two birds have then both together uttered their loud chirping notes and flown away.
On revisiting the spot a year after I had heard the green woodpecker drumming every day in the oak by the river, I found that he had forsaken it, and that close by, on the other side of the stream, a great spotted woodpecker had selected as his drumming-tree a very big elm growing on the bank. He drummed on a large dead branch about forty feet from the ground, and the sound he made was quite as loud as that of the green bird. It may be that the two big woodpeckers, who play equally well on the same instrument, are intolerant of one another's presence, and that in this case the spotted bird had driven the larger yaffle from his territory.
One of the prettiest spots by the water was that very one where the spotted bird was accustomed to come, and I often went there at noon and sat for an hour on the grassy bank in the shade of the drumming-tree. The river was but thirty to forty feet wide at that spot, with masses of water forget-me-not growing on the opposite bank, clearly reflected { 13} in the sherry-coloured sunlit current below. The trees were mostly oaks, in the young vivid green of early June foliage. And one day when the sky, seen through that fresh foliage, was without a stain of vapour in its pure azure, when the wood was full of clear sunlight--so clear that silken spider webs, thirty or forty feet high in the oaks, were visible as shining red and blue and purple lines--the bird, after drumming high above my head, flew to an oak tree just before me, and clinging vertically to the bark on the high part of the trunk, remained there motionless for some time. His statuesque attitude, as he sat with his head thrown well back, the light glinting on his hard polished feathers, black and white and crimson, the setting in which he appeared of greenest translucent leaves and hoary bark and open sunlit space, all together made him seem not only our handsomest woodpecker, but our most beautiful bird. I had seen him at his best, and sitting there motionless amid the wind-fluttered leaves, he was like a bird-figure carved from some beautiful vari-coloured stone.