Then, long before the summer is past, he assumes the sober dress of his mate and her monosyllabic note, and fades so gradually out of our sight and hearing that he departs without our being aware of it. Summer still burns with unabated fervor, when we suddenly realize that there are no bobolinks. Nor are there any under the less changeful skies whither our changed bird has flown to be a reed-bird or rice-bird and to find mankind his enemies. He is no longer a singer but a gourmand and valued only as a choice morsel, doubtless delicious, yet one that should choke a New Englander.
The migrant woodpecker whose cheery cackle assures us of the certainty of spring is rich in names that well befit him. If you take to high-sounding titles for your humble friends, you will accept _Colaptes auratus_, as he flies above you, borrowing more gold of the sunbeams that shine through his yellow pinions, or will be content to call him simply golden-winged. When he flashes his wings in straight-away flight before you, or sounds his sharp, single note of alarm, or peers down from the door of his lofty tower, or hangs on its wooden wall, or clinging to a fence stake displays his mottled back, you recognize the fitness of each name the country folk have given him--flicker, yellow-hammer, yarrup, highhole or highholder, and what Thoreau often termed him, partridge-woodpecker. It is a wonder that the joyous cackle wherewith he announces his return from his winter sojourn in the South has not gained him another, and that love note, so like the slow whetting of a knife upon a steel, still another. Perhaps it is because they are especially sounds of spring and seldom if ever heard after the season of joyful arrival and love-making.
During the same season you frequently hear him attuning his harsh sharp voice to its softest note of endearment, a long-drawn and modulated variation of his cackle. When household cares begin, the lord and lady of the wooden tower, like too many greater and wiser two-legged folk, give over singing and soft words. At home and abroad their deportment is sober and business-like, and except for an occasional alarm-cry they are mostly silent.
As you wander through the orchard of an early midsummer day and pause beside an old apple-tree to listen to the cuckoo's flute or admire the airy fabric of the wood pewee's nest, a larger scale of lichen on the lichened boughs, you hear a smothered vibrant murmur close beside you, as if the heart of the old tree was pulsating with audible life. It is startlingly suggestive of disturbed yellow-jackets, but when you move around the trunk in cautious reconnoissance, you discover the round portal of a flicker's home, and the sound resolves itself into harmlessness. It is only the callow young clamoring for food, or complaining of their circumscribed quarters.