A few days since I climbed up to the nest of the downy woodpecker, in the decayed top of a sugar maple.  For better protection against driving rains, the hole, which was rather more than an inch in diameter, was made immediately beneath a branch which stretched out almost horizontally from the main stem.  It appeared merely a deeper shadow upon the dark and mottled surface of the bark with which the branches were covered, and could not be detected by the eye until one was within a few feet of it.  The young chirped vociferously as I approached the nest, thinking it was the 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 circumstance of observing a pair of yellow-bellied woodpeckers—­the most rare and secluded, and, next to the red-headed, the most beautiful species found in our woods—­breeding in an old, truncated beech in the Beaverkill Mountains, an 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 the 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 turn 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.