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| From Cambridge Natural History, vol. iv., “Birds,” by permission of Macmillan & Co., Ltd. |
| Lesser Spotted Woodpecker. |
The three species just mentioned are the only woodpeckers that inhabit Britain, though several others are mistakenly recorded as occurring in the country—and especially the great black woodpecker, the Picus martius of Linnaeus, which must be regarded as the type of that genus.[1] This fine species considerably exceeds the green woodpecker in size, and except for its red cap is wholly black. It is chiefly an inhabitant of the fir forests of the Old World, from Lapland to Galicia and across Siberia to Japan. In North America this species is replaced by Picus pileatus, there generally known as the logcock, an equally fine species, but variegated with white; and farther to the southward occur two that are finer still, P. principalis, the ivory-billed woodpecker and P. imperialis. The Picinae indeed flourish in the New World, nearly one-half of the described species being American, but of the large number that inhabit Canada and the United States we can mention only a few.
First of these is the Californian woodpecker, Melanerpes formicivorus, which has been said to display an amount of providence beyond almost any other bird in the number of acorns it fixes tightly in holes which it makes in the bark of trees, and thus “a large pine forty or fifty feet high will present the appearance of being closely studded with brass nails, the heads only being visible.” This is not done to furnish food in winter, for the species migrates, and only returns in spring to the forests where its supplies are laid up. It has been asserted that the acorns thus stored are always those which contain a maggot, and, being fitted into the sockets prepared for them cup-end foremost, the enclosed insects are unable to escape, as they otherwise would, and are thus ready for consumption by the birds on their return from the south. But this statement has again been contradicted, and, moreover, it is alleged that these woodpeckers follow their instinct so blindly that “they do not distinguish between an acorn and a pebble,” so that they “fill up the holes they have drilled with so much labor, not only with acorns but occasionally with stones” (cf. Baird, Brewer and Ridgway, North American Birds, ii. pp. 569-571).
The next North-American form deserving notice is the genus Colaptes, represented in the north and east by C. auratus, the golden-winged woodpecker or flicker, in most parts of the country a familiar bird, but in the south and west replaced by the allied C. mexicanus, easily distinguishable among other characteristics by having the shafts of its quills red instead of yellow. It is curious, however, that, in the valleys of the upper Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, where the range of the two kinds overlaps, birds are found presenting an extraordinary mixture of the otherwise distinctive features of each.
Other North American forms are the downy and hairy woodpeckers, small birds with spotted black and white plumage, which are very valuable as destroyers of harmful grubs and borers; the redheaded woodpecker, a very handsome form with strongly contrasted red, black and white plumage, common west of the Alleghany Mountains; and the yellow-bellied woodpecker (“sapsucker”).
Some other woodpeckers deserve especial notice—the Colaptes or Soroplex campestris, which inhabits the treeless plains of Paraguay and La Plata; also the South-African woodpecker Geocolaptes olivaceus, which lives almost entirely on the ground or rocks, and picks a hole for its nest in the bank of a stream (Zoologist, 1882, p. 208).
The woodpeckers, together with the wrynecks (q.v.), form a very natural division of scansorial birds with zygodactylous feet, and were regarded by T. H. Huxley as forming a distinct division of birds to which he gave the name Celeomorphae, whilst W. K. Parker separated them from all other birds as Saurognathae. (A. N.)
WOODS, SIR ALBERT (1816–1904), English herald, son of Sir William Woods, Garter king-of-arms from 1838 to his death in 1842, was born on the 16th of April 1816. In 1838 he became a member of the chapter of the Heralds' College, of which he was appointed registrar in 1866. In 1869 he was knighted and became Garter king-of-arms. In this capacity he was entrusted with many missions to convey the order to foreign sovereigns; he was also registrar from 1878 of the orders of the Star of India and of the Indian Empire; and from 1869 was king-of-arms of the order of St Michael and St George. He officiated at the coronations both of Queen Victoria and of King Edward VII., and his authority on questions of precedence was unique. His later distinctions were K.C.B. (1897), K.C.M.G. (1899) and G.C.V.O. (1903). He died on the 7th of January 1904.
WOODS, LEONARD (1774–1854), American theologian, was born at Princeton, Massachusetts, on the 19th of June 1774. He graduated at Harvard in 1796, and in 1798 was ordained pastor of the Congregational Church at West Newbury. He was prominent among the founders of Andover Theological Seminary, and was its first professor, occupying the chair of Christian theology from 1805 to 1846, and being professor emeritus until his death in Andover on the 24th of August 1854. He helped to establish the American Tract Society, the American Education Society, the Temperance Society and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He was an orthodox Calvinist and an able dialectician. His principal works (5 vols., Andover, 1849-50) were Lectures on the Inspiration of the Scriptures (1829), Memoirs of American Missionaries (1833), Examination of the Doctrine of Perfection (1841), Lectures on Church Government (1843), and Lectures on Swedenborgianism (1846); he also wrote a History of Andover Seminary (1848), completed by his son.
His son, Leonard Woods (1807–1878), was born in West Newbury, Mass., on the 24th of November 1807, and graduated at Union College in 1827 and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1830. His translation of Georg Christian Knapp's Christian Theology (1831–1833) was long used as a text-book in American theological seminaries. He was assistant Hebrew instructor (1832–1833) at Andover, and having been licensed to preach by the Londonderry Presbytery in 1830 was ordained as an evangelist by the Third Presbytery of New York in 1833. In 1834–1837 he edited the newly-established Literary and Theological Review, in which he opposed the “New Haven” theology. After being professor of sacred literature in the Bangor Theological Seminary for three years, he was president of Bowdoin College from 1839 to 1866, and introduced there many important reforms. From June 1867 to September 1868 Dr Woods worked in London and Paris for the Maine Historical Society, collecting materials for the early history of Maine; he induced J. G. Kohl of Bremen to prepare the first volume (1868) of the Historical Society's Documentary History, and he discovered a MS. of Hakluyt's Discourse on Western Planting, which was edited, partly with Woods's notes, by Charles Dean in 1877. He died in Boston on the 24th of December 1878. He was a remarkable linguist, conversationalist and orator, notable for his uncompromising independence, his opinion that the German reformation was a misfortune and that the reformation should have been within the church.
See E. A. Park, Life and Character of Leonard Woods, Jr. (Andover, 1880).
Alva Woods (1794–1887), a nephew of the elder Leonard and the son of Abel Woods (1765–1850), a Baptist preacher, graduated at Harvard in 1817 and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1821, and was ordained as a Baptist minister. In 1824–1828 he was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Brown University, acting as president in 1826–1827; in 1828–1831 was president of Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky; and in 1831–1837 was president of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where he organized the Alabama Female Athenaeum. After 1839 he lived in Providence, R.I.
WOODSTOCK, a town and port of entry of Oxford county, Ontario, Canada, 80 m. S.W. of Toronto by rail, on Cedar creek, the Thames river and the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific railways. Pop. (1901) 8833. It is in one of the best agricultural sections of the province, and has a large export trade in cheese, butter and farm produce. Organs, pianos and agricultural implements are manufactured. It contains a residential school, under the control of the Baptist church, affiliated with McMaster University, Toronto.
- ↑ The expression Picus martius was by old writers used in a very general sense for all birds that climbed trees, not only woodpeckers, but for the nuthatch and tree-creeper (qq.v.) as well. The adjective martius loses all its significance if it be removed from Picus as some even respectable authorities have separated it.
