216 BULLETIN 174, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



over immense areas. The cultures, once started, are wrought upon continuously 

 year by year, as material avails or the colony flourishes. Live-oaks themselves 

 are the commonest hosts, together with the white, or post, oak, and the black oak 

 of the southern counties. After these come sycamore and yellow pine or, more 

 rarely, eucalyptus. Telegraph and telephone poles, gables, cornices, and, in fact, 

 any wooden structure where they are permitted to work, if near the source of 

 acorn supply, may come in for ornamentation. On a small square-sawed tele- 

 phone pole near Marysville I found sixty acorns (and pecans purloined from 

 a neighboring orchard) imbedded in a space five inches wide and two feet long. 

 At that rate the pole carried some 1500 of these tiny storehouses. 



In Tecolote Canyon, west of Santa Barbara, there is a giant sycamore which 

 I count one of the handsomest examples of Carpintero's workmanship — an 

 unbroken shaft, at least forty feet high and three feet across the inlaid face, 

 covered with a "solid" mass of acorns totalling, say, some 20,000. Strawberry 

 Valley in the San Jacinto Mountains appears to be a paradise for the Cali- 

 fornia Woodpecker. Here majestic oaks (Querctis calif ornica) alternate with 

 still more majestic pines {Pinus ponderosa), the former for sustenance and 

 the latter for storage, and the doughty "California" is probably the most 

 abundant bird in the valley. The boles of the most enormous pines are methodi- 

 cally riddled with their acorn-carrying niches, and in some of the trees the 

 work is carried through from base to crown. In one such tree I estimated 

 that there were imbedded no less than 50,000 acorns. 



Dr. William E. Eitter has made an intensive study of this inter- 

 esting habit of the California woodpecker and has published the re- 

 sults of his observations and theories in three extensive papers (1921, 

 1922, 1938) . There is much food for thought in these scholarly papers, 

 to which the reader is referred, but space here will permit only brief 

 quotations from or references to them. As to whether the hole drill- 

 ing is injurious to the trees, he says (1921) : "Although I have ex- 

 amined many storage pines in widely separated localities, I have 

 never seen anything even suggestive of harm to the trees from the 

 holes. Never, so far as I have noticed, do the holes pierce through 

 into the deeper living layers of the bark." He noticed that "almost 

 without exception the nuts were inserted tip in and base out, most 

 of them fitting the hole snugly," having been driven in good and 

 hard, and flush with the surface of the bark, or even countersunken 

 below it ; and that "to a certain extent the store holes are made to fit 

 the size of the acorns they are to receive" ; this latter point was dis- 

 covered when he noted that, in a region where the black oak {Quer- 

 cus Icelloggii) predominated, the holes were considerably larger than 

 they were in the live-oak region, the acorns of the black oak being 

 sharply larger than those of the live oak. In some cases the acorns 

 were not driven in flush with the bark, the base being left protrud- 

 ing somewhat and thus leaving them vulnerable to pilfering by 

 rodents and perhaps some birds; in this connection, he says: "Con- 

 clusive evidence that nut-eating rodents (squirrels, rats) prey upon 

 the acorns stored by the woodpeckers was first obtained on the pres- 

 ent visit. Two trees were found on which the bark immediately 



