354 MICHIGAN BIRD LIFE. 



velvet black chest band, bvit the throat and chin of the female arc white. 



Distribution. — Eastern North America north to about latitude 63-^°, 

 breeding from Massachusetts northward; south in winter to the West 

 Indies, Mexico and Costa Rica. 



The Sapsucker is an abundant migrant in most parts of the state and 

 doubtless breeds regularly everywhere in the state except perhaps in the 

 southernmost three tiers of counties; even there it may nest occasionally 

 (one record for Monroe county). Farther northward it is a regular summer 

 resident becoming more numerous over the upper part of the Lower Penin- 

 sula and throughout the Upper Peninsula. It seems to prefer hardwood 

 growths and deciduous trees, although it is by no means absent from pine 

 regions. Ordinarily it appears from the south during the first half of April, 

 from the 1st to the 5th in the southern part of the state, and from the 12th 

 to the 20th farther north. It moves southward somewhat irregularly but 

 seems to be most abundant during the latter half of August. Occasionally 

 a few individuals spend the winter with us. 



It is by no means a noisy bird, and as its tattoo closely resembles that of 

 other species, it may easily pass unnoticed unless attention is especially 

 called to it. It is our single woodpecker which is always mischievous, 

 and probably is the one least deserving of protection at the hands of the 

 fruit grower, farmer and forester. Its well known habit of perforating 

 the bark of fruit and shade trees with innumerable squarish holes, from 

 which it first extracts the soft inner bark or cambium and later drinks the 

 flowing sap, has given it the name of Sapsucker, to which it is fully entitled. 

 Many ingenious theories have been advanced to account for this remarkable 

 habit, but the simple truth of the matter is that the holes are made solely 

 to get the inner bark and the sap, never for the purpose of extracting insects 

 from the tree. True, the bird eats freely the insects which are subsequently 

 attracted by the flowing sap, but this is no part of the original plan. The 

 trees thus attacked are of various kinds, and probably at one time and 

 another almost every species of forest and orchard tree is attacked, but the 

 bird shows a particular fondness for the Scotch and Norway (red) pines, the 

 sugar maple, apple, pear, mountain ash, haw and white birch. 



The late Frank Bolles gives the following summary of the habits of the 

 Sapsucker as observed by him in New Hampshire, from April to October, 

 in 1889 and 1890: "From these observations I draw the following con- 

 clusions: The Yellow-bellied Woodpecker is in the habit for successive 

 years of drilling the canoe birch, red maple, red oak, white ash, and probably 

 other trees for the purpose of taking from them the elaborated sap and in 

 some cases parts of the cambium layer; that the birds consume the sap 

 in large quantities for its own sake and not for insect matter which such sap 

 may chance occasionally to contain; that the sap attracts many insects 

 of various species, a few of which form a considerable part of the food of 

 this bird, but whose capture does not occupy its time to anything like the 

 extent to which sap drinking occupies it; that different families of these 

 Woodpeckers occupy different orchards, such families consisting of a male, 

 female and from one to four or five young birds; that the orchards consist 

 of several trees usually only a few rods apart, and that these trees are 

 regularly and constantly visited from sunrise until long after sunset, not 

 only by the woodpeckers themselves, but by numerous parasitical humming- 

 birds, which are sometimes unmolested but probably quite as often repelled ; 

 that the forest trees attacked by them generally die, possibly in the second 



