130 BULLETIN 174, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



Eggs. — [Author's note: The yellow-bellied sapsucker lays four 

 to seven eggs to a set, though five or six eggs are more commonly 

 found. They vary from ovate to elliptical-ovate and sometimes to 

 elliptical-oval. The shell is smooth and either dull or moderately 

 glossy. They are pure white, like all woodpeckers' eggs. The 

 measurements of 52 eggs average 22.44 by 16.92 millimeters ; the eggs 

 showing the four extremes measure 24.9 by 17.0, 23.8 by 18.0, 20.57 

 by 16.26, and 22.1 by 15.5 millimeters.] 



Young. — As in the case of most nestling birds reared in a hole 

 in a tree, little is known of the young sapsuckers while they are in 

 the nest. 



Frank Bolles (1892) speaks of "a nest filled w^ith noisy fledglings 

 whose squealing sounded afar in the otherwise silent woods. * * * 

 The parent birds came frequently to the tree, and their arrival was 

 always greeted by more vigorous crying from the young." 



William Brewster (1876a), in his study of the bird at Umbagog 

 Lake, Maine, says: "The young leave the nest in July, and for a 

 long time the brood remains together, being still fed by the parents. 

 They are very playful, sporting about the tree-trunks and chasing 

 one another continually." 



Frank Bolles (1892) has given a very interesting, detailed account 

 of rearing three nestlings, about to be fledged, over a period of 

 three and a half months. The three birds were dissimilar enough 

 in coloring to be distinguished from one another; they proved to 

 be two males and one female; and they soon developed marked 

 differences in conduct and personality. Mr. Bolles at first kept 

 them in a large cage in which they had ample space to climb about 

 and later allowed them to fly around a room. They became very 

 tame, letting him handle them freely. They subsisted almost en- 

 tirely on maple syrup and water in equal parts, fed by hand at first, 

 but in a few days they drank readily from a basin. They caught 

 a few flies and ate some other insects that entered the cage, at- 

 tracted by the syrup. Mr. Bolles says, however, that "the number 

 of insects caught by them in this way was small, and I do not think 

 amounted at any time to ten percent of their food." 



The birds were lively and apparently in perfect health from the 

 time they were captured, July 7, until October 11, when one of 

 them, the female, began to droop. Two days later she had a con- 

 vulsion in the morning and died in the afternoon. Autopsy showed 

 that her body was well nourished and that the organs were ap- 

 parently normal except the liver, which was "very large, deeply 

 bile-stained, and very soft." 



A week later the other two birds died after exhibiting the same 

 symptoms as the first bird. The Department of Agriculture ex- 



