Campephilus principalis, an extinct woodpecker, from Birds of North America illustration by Theodore Jasper, 1888. Larger.
California's natural resources have sometimes generated harsh feelings among those who compete for them. Maybe that's because cooperation is just for the birds.
Englishwoman Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming sailed to San Francisco from Tahiti in 1878. For five months she traveled California, and seemed especially impressed by the magnificent Sierra landscapes and by the animal communities that thrived therein.
My only noisy companions are the woodpeckers, who, with their hard, sharp beak, drill deep holes all over the pine-trees; sometimes there are so many of them, all tap, tap, tapping, that you would think there must surely be carpenters working in the forest. I have seen trees with hundreds of holes in them, pierced to the depth of a couple of inches, till they are literally like a honeycomb—each hole bored as neatly as if it had been made by a joiner's auger.
As fast as they are made, the woodpeckers and their partners, the blue jays, carefully deposit an acorn in each hole as their winter store, always with the point turned inwards, and the flat base just closes the opening. The careful woodpecker always selects one which exactly fits the hole, while the less tidy blue jay drops in the first he finds, whether it fits or not. Some of these acorns breed worms and some do not; so then the two birds divide the store, the woodpeckers eating the worms, while their friends get the sound acorns. Here you have a true cooperative society in the forest.
C. F. Gordon-Cumming's travel letters were published as Granite Crags in 1884.
Soon after this grove was discovered, some Goths determined to make known its glories by distributing sections of wood and of bark to various parts of the world. To this end, one of the noblest trees was felled,—an operation which kept five men hard at work for twenty-two days, boring through the tree with pump-augers. Even after the poor giant had been sawn in two, it refused to fall, and its murderers had to work for three days more, driving in wedges on one side, till they succeeded in tilting it over; and great was the fall of it. Then they smoothed the poor stump, at six feet above the ground, removed its bark, and built a pavilion over it, in which a party of thirty-two persons found room to dance,—not a savage war-dance over the mighty, conquered monarch, but commonplace quadrilles, with attendant musicians and spectators, all crowded into this novel ball-room. Its diameter is twenty-four feet, and its age, reckoned by the rings of annual growth, is found to be about 1300 years.
C. F. Gordon-Comming's travel letters were published as Granite Crags in 1884.
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