278 BULLETIN 174, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



and milked like cows. The ants take good care of their honey-pro- 

 ducing "cattle," driving them avraj' from ladybugs and other enemies, 

 leading them to new pastures, if the old ones dry up, sheltering the 

 aphid eggs in their nests, and carrying the young aphids out onto 

 the plants to feed. Mr. Forbush (1927) also says: "Ants riddle 

 posts set in the ground or any timber or lumber resting upon or 

 in contact with the ground. They destroy the sills of buildings set 

 close to the ground and often ruin livmg trees, especially such as 

 have a few dead roots. They infest lawns and buildings, destroying 

 grass on the lawns and food in the house, and are difficult to eradi- 

 cate. They sometimes eat alive the young of certain ground-nesting 

 birds. They are very prolific and require a severe check on their 

 numbers. Otherwise they would become unbearable pests." 



The flicker explores the ground, often scratching away leaves or 

 rublDish, to locate the ant nests, digs into the nest with its long bill, 

 and, as the ants come pouring out, it laps them up in quantities or 

 inserts its long, sticky tongue deep down into the nest to get the 

 young and eggs. Early in spring it digs into the large mounds of 

 the mound-building ants, while the ants are less active, or tears open 

 some rotten stump to uncover a nest. Only a few days ago, I dug 

 into an old apple-tree stump for. some rotten wood to put on some of 

 my wildflowers and uncovered a large nest of ants; within a very 

 few minutes my pair of flickers were on the job cleaning up the ants 

 and their pupae. 



Other insect food of the flicker includes a variety of beetles, wasps, 

 grasshoppers, crickets, mole crickets, chinch bugs, wood lice, cater- 

 pillars, grubs, and various flying insects, which it sometimes catches 

 on the wing, darting after them like a flycatcher (Burns, 1900). 



According to Beal (1911), 39.08 percent of its food is vegetable 

 matter. Most of this consists of wild fruits and berries, such as the 

 berries of the dogwood {Cornus) and Virginia creeper, hackberries, 

 blueberries, huckleberries, pokeberries, serviceberries (AmeJanchier) , 

 elderberries, barberries, mulberries, blackberries, wild grapes, wild 

 black cherries, choke cherries, cultivated cherries, and the berries of 

 the black alder, sour gum, black gum, greenbrier (Smilax), spicebush 

 (Bemoin), red cedar, hawthorn, mountain ash. and woodbine. Har- 

 old H. Bailey (1913) says that while the fall migration is at its 

 height in Virginia, about October first, "they are particularly fond 

 of the blue berry of the black-gum tree, and after once finding a tree 

 with fruit, will continue to come to it until every berry is gone, even 

 though continually shot at. I remember a case a few years back, when 

 a local gunner killed fifty-seven flickers from one black-gum tree 

 in one iorenoon. After the gumberries are gone, they take to the 

 dogwood berry for their main article of food, a fine red berry and 

 always plentiful in Tidewater." 



