Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers

This is the monumental 1939 volume that defined bird literature for generations. Arthur Cleveland Bent began his monumental project in 1910 at the Smithsonian's request, gathering observations from hundreds of amateur naturalists and professional ornithologists across the continent. The result is the most comprehensive collection of North American bird field observations ever assembled, and this volume聚焦 the woodpeckers: every species found on the continent, rendered in enthusiastic and surprisingly readable prose. Here you'll find the ivory-billed woodpecker, whose striking beauty and dependence on old-growth forests Bent documents with an urgency we now understand was prophetic. Here too are the Harris's Woodpecker taking shelter during downpours in western Washington rainforests, the White-headed Woodpecker descending to mountain streams in California's highlands, the flicker drumming in spring across a thousand fields. Bent gives us courtship rituals, nesting habits, eggs, plumage variations, vocalizations, enemies, range, and migration. This is not a field guide to help you identify birds at your feeder. It is something rarer: a naturalist's delight that satisfies the deeper hunger that comes after you've seen something beautiful and need to understand its life. For anyone who has watched a pileated woodpecker crash through the canopy and wondered what lies behind that magnificent determination, this book answers with decades of patient, passionate observation.