The most obvious resident of the neighborhood, at four o'clock in the morning, was always the golden-winged woodpecker, or flicker. Though he scorned the breakfast I offered, having no vegetarian proclivities, he did not refuse me his presence. I found him a character, and an amusing study, and I never saw his tribe so numerous and so much at home.
Though largest in size of my four o'clock birds, and most fully represented (always excepting the English sparrows), the golden-wing was not in command. The autocrat of the hour, the reigning power, was quite a different personage, although belonging to the woodpecker family. It was a red-headed woodpecker who assumed to own the lawn and be master of the feast. This individual was marked by a defect in plumage, and had been a regular caller since the morning of my arrival. During the blackbird supremacy over the corn supply he had been hardly more than a spectator, coming to the trunk of the elm and surveying the assembly of blue jays, doves, blackbirds, and sparrows with interest, as one looks down upon a herd with whom he has nothing in common. But when those birds departed, and the visitors were of a different character, mostly cardinals, with an occasional blue jay, he at once took the place he felt belonged to him--that of dictator.
The Virginia cardinal, a genuine F. F. V., and a regular attendant at my corn breakfast, was a subject of special study with me; indeed, it was largely on his account that I had set up my tent in that part of the world. I had all my life known him as a tenant of cages, and it struck me at first as very odd to see him flying about freely, like other wild birds. No one, it seemed to me, ever looked so out of place as this fellow of elegant manners, aristocratic crest, and brilliant dress, hopping about on the ground with his exaggerated little hops, tail held stiffly up out of harm's way, and uttering sharp "tsips." One could not help the feeling that he was altogether too fine for this common work-a-day existence; that he was intended for show; and that a gilded cage was his proper abiding-place, with a retinue of human servants to minister to his comfort. Yet he was modest and unassuming, and appeared really to enjoy his life of hard work; varying his struggles with a kernel of hard corn on the ground, where his color shone out like a flower against the green, with a rest on a spruce-tree, where