150 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



or better, some hard dry strip of birch bark which has a hollow space 

 beneath, and mounting himself securely upon it, stretches backward to 

 his full extent and lets fly his head and neck with all the force of his con- 

 centrated muscles, his beak flying with such rapidity as to be practically 

 invisible. The rolling tattoo produced by this performance resounds 

 across the lake and valley for hundreds of rods. While we were encamped 

 on the shores of the Upper Ausable we could hear at least a dozen sap- 

 suckers from our camping site, all drumming to hurry on the sunrise. 

 This practice seemed to continue well on into the summer, even after the 

 young were nearly ready to leave the nest. While the Sapsucker is migrat- 

 ing through portions of the State which are not within its breeding range, 

 his drumming is rarely heard but he is frequently seen about our ever- 

 greens and shade trees, and his snarling or squealing note is often heard, 

 especially when chasing rivals away from the trees which he has selected for 

 sugar-making. At this season of the year he seems to care little for insect 

 fare. He bores numerous rows of holes through the bark of our sap trees, 

 sometimes entirely riddling the trunk and causing the sap to flow in such 

 abundance as to destroy the vigor of the tree. One frequently finds 

 mountain ash trees, pines, black spruces, ironwoods and birches so weakened 

 by the boring of this species that they never recover from his attack. The 

 object of the Sapsucker in boring these holes, as his name signifies, is to 

 secure the resinous or sugar-laden sap and I have frequently watched a 

 Sapsucker which had tapped at least a dozen trees in the same immediate 

 vicinity, each one of which he visited in turn, lapping up the sap from all 

 the holes with his brushy tongue and then passing on to the next by merely 

 casting himself backward from the trunk and soaring with one swoop to 

 the next tree without a stroke of his wing, working up this trunk and passing 

 on to the next in the same way until he had completed the loop. As the 

 spring advances and the weather becomes warm, the sap often begins to 

 ferment. I suspect this is the reason that the Sapsucker is so frequently 

 found stupefied by feeding on too great an abundance of the liquid. On 

 several occasions I have seen a Sapsucker so gorged with fermented sap 

 that he allowed himself to be picked up in the hand and I have seen one 



