The Green Woodpecker by Grant Allen

WE live so closely and familiarly with nature on the isolated hilltop, where my cottage is perched, that we often behold from our own drawing-room windows pretty rural sights, which seem intensely strange to more town-bred visitors. A little while since, for example, I was amused at reading in an evening newspaper a lament by a really well-informed and observant naturalist on the difficulty of actually seeing the night-jar, or fern-owl, alight upon a tree, and stand, as is his wont, lengthwise, not transversely to the branch that bears him. Now, from our little bay lattice that doubting Thomas might see the weird bird nightly, not twenty yards off, the whole summer through, crooning its passionate song, full in view of our house, from a gnarled old fir-tree.

So again this morning, at breakfast, we raised our eyes from the buttered eggs and coffee, and they fell at once on a big green woodpecker, creeping upward, after his fashion, along a russet-brown pine-trunk, not fifteen feet from the place at table where we were quietly sitting. One could make out with the naked eye the dark olive-green of his back, relieved by the brilliant crimson patch on his gleaming crown. For several minutes he stood there, clambering slowly up the tree, though we rose from our seats and approached quite close to the open window to examine him.