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Cornugaya Directory 04
Page 10
The woodpeckers all build in about the same manner, excavating the
trunk or branch of a decayed tree, and depositing the eggs on the fine
fragments of wood at the bottom of the cavity. Though the nest is not
especially an artistic work,--requiring strength rather than
skill,--yet the eggs and the young of few other birds are so
completely housed from the elements, or protected from their natural
enemies--the jays, crows, hawks, and owls. A tree with a natural
cavity is never selected, but one which has been dead just long enough
to have become soft and brittle throughout. The bird goes in
horizontally for a few inches, making a hole perfectly round and
smooth and adapted to his size; then turns downward, gradually
enlarging the hole, as he proceeds, to the depth of ten, fifteen,
twenty inches, according to the softness of the tree and the urgency
of the mother bird to deposit her eggs. While excavating, male and
female work alternately. After one has been engaged fifteen or twenty
minutes, drilling, and carrying out chips, it ascends to an upper
limb, utters a loud call or two, when its mate soon appears, and,
alighting near it on the branch, the pair chatter and caress a moment;
then the fresh one enters the cavity and the other flies away.
It so happened that on the 9th of September, 1589, there was one of
the three great outbreaks of the Mattmark See that have from time to
time devastated the valley of Saas. {15} It is probable that the
chapels were decided upon in consequence of some grace shown by the
miraculous picture of the Virgin, which had mitigated a disaster
occurring so soon after the anniversary of her own Nativity.
Tabachetti, arriving at this juncture, may have offered to undertake
them if the Saas people would give him an asylum. Here, at any
rate, I suppose him to have stayed till some time in 1590, probably
the second half of it, his design of eventually returning home, if
he ever entertained it, being then interrupted by a summons to Crea
near Casale, where I believe him to have worked with a few brief
interruptions thenceforward for little if at all short of half a
century, or until about the year 1640. I admit, however, that the
evidence for assigning him so long a life rests solely on the
supposed identity of the figure known as "Il Vecchietto," in the
Varallo Descent from the Cross chapel, with the portrait of
Tabachetti himself in the Ecce Homo chapel, also at Varallo.
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