An Exaggerated Bird

The imperial woodpecker is an j agsreration of the ordinary red-headed woodpecker. It is nearly two feet long. its plumage black and white, with a gorgeous searlet crest, its bill white. It Uves in Mexico and in the Sierra Madre rnountíiins. These birds art ahvays found in pairs and are destroyers of trees, as they devote their entire energies to one tree for as long as a fortnight, inj it so greatly that the tree dies. In Europe and Asia there is a gray-headed woodpecker. The largest European woodpecker is seventeen inches long, black, with scarlet crest. It is called the great black woodpecker. The little brown woodpecker of Ceylon is not five inches long. The white-headed woodpecker is a wise-looking little creature that lives in the pine woods of the Paciiic coast. There are some two hundred and fifty species of woodpeckers, and they inhabit almost every part of thj globe.