Peter looked puzzled.  He kept turning it over in his mind as he watched Yellow-Wing plunge his long stout bill into an ant hill and then gobble up the ants as they came rushing out to see what the trouble was.

“I don’t see how ants could change the habits of anybody,” he ventured after a while.

Yellow-Wing’s eyes twinkled.  “Why don’t you learn to eat them?” he demanded.  “If you would, they might change your habits.  The beginning of the change in the habits of my folks began a long time ago.”

“Way back in the beginning of things, when the world was young?” asked Peter.

“No, not quite so far back as that,” replied Yellow-Wing.  “Great-great-ever-so-great-grandfather, who was the first Flicker, was, of course, a member of the Woodpecker family, and he got his living in regular Woodpecker fashion.  It never entered his head to look for food anywhere but in the trees, and I don’t suppose that it ever entered his head to set foot on the ground.  It was the same with his children and his children’s children for a long time.

“But though they lived as true Woodpeckers should, the Flickers always were a bit sharper-witted and more independent than most of their relatives.  For one thing they had discovered that ants were fine eating and that great numbers of them were to be found running up and down the trunks of certain trees.  So the Flickers used to look for these trees and feast on the ants.  It saved a lot of labor.  A stomachful of ants could be picked from the trunk of a tree in the time it would take to dig out one worm in the wood, to say nothing of the saving of hard work.

“One day a few years ago my great-great-great-grandfather, so the story goes, had stuffed himself with ants from the trunk of a tree and had settled himself for a rest.  From where he sat he could see a procession of ants going up and down the tree, and he got to wondering where they all came from and where they all went to.  So he watched and presently discovered that that double line of ants led out along the ground from the foot of the tree.  This made him still more curious and he followed it, flying along just over it.  He had gone but a short distance when he came to a little mound of sand, and there the line of ants ended.  Grandfather Flicker flew up in a tree from which he could look right down on that mound, and it didn’t take him long to discover that those ants were going in and out of little holes in that mound.

“‘As I live, that must be their home!’ exclaimed he.  ’That place is alive with them.  What a place to fill one’s stomach!  I never was on the ground in my life, but the next time I’m hungry, I’m going to see what the ground is like.  I won’t have to stay on it long to get my dinner here.’