ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE BIRD. 937 
One of the trees died in spite of his diligence, but 
he has cleaned the grubs out of the others. He 
would work hard on the far side from me (which 
happened to be the grub side), and would throw one 
eye around every second or so to watch the great ogre 
with tubular eyes that sat in the glass cage there. 
How I wished I could say to him that it was all right, 
and that I was grateful for his services; but my si- 
lence was my best greeting. If I could not save him 
from the labor of eating his bread in the sweat of his 
face, I wanted to relieve him from that of getting his 
grub in the fear of his heart ; but I could not. 
These two little woodpeckers are frequently mis- 
called “sapsuckers.” But they do not eat sap. They 
do, in plumage, and in a general way, resemble the 
sapsuckers, but the latter lacks the horny barbed 
tongue to spear the grub with, and sips the sap of 
trees and does not dig for grubs. (See plate facing 
page 149.) 
For a long time I could not see this last bird, 
though it left its girdlings on the pines in the yard and 
evidently passed me every spring. Many birds stun 
themselves against my window panes—as if they tried 
to fly through the half octagon ; or perhaps they see 
the reflection of trees in the glass. The first time I 
ever saw this sapsucker was just after one had stunned 
herself in this way. I picked her up, kept her all 
day, when she seemed to revive. I threw her up 
late that afternoon and she alighted in an elm, but 
next morning she was dead, but still clinging upright 
as if alive. 
