How to Attract the Birds 



insect eggs and empty a burrow of every grub in it ! 

 Inspecting each crevice where moth or beetle might 

 lay her eggs, he works his way around a tree from 

 bottom to top, now stopping to listen for the stirring 

 of a borer under the smooth, innocent- looking bark, 

 now tapping at a suspicious point and quickly drill- 

 ing a hole where there is a prospect of heading oflf 

 his victim. Using his bill as a chisel and mallet and 

 his long tongue as a barbed spear to draw the grub 

 from its nethermost hiding place, he lets nothing 

 escape him. Boring beetles, tree -boring caterpil- 

 lars, timber ants, and other insects which are inacces- 

 sible to other birds, must yield their reluctant bodies 

 to that merciless barbed tongue. Our little friend 

 downy and the hairy woodpecker, the most benefi- 

 cial members of the family, the flicker that descends 

 to the ground to eat ants, the red -headed wood- 

 pecker that intersperses his diet with grasshoppers, 

 even the much-maligned sapsucker that pays for his 

 intemperate drinks of freshly drawn sap by eating 

 ants, grasshoppers, flies, wasps, bugs, and beetles, — 

 to these common woodpeckers and to their less 

 neighborly kin, more than to any other agency, we 

 owe the preservation of our timber from hordes of 

 destructive insects. 



But acknowledgment of this deep obligation 

 must not cause us to overlook the nuthatches, brown 

 creepers, chickadees, kinglets, and such other help- 

 ers that keep up quite as tireless a search for insects 

 on the tree trunks and larger limbs as the more 

 perfectly equipped woodpeckers. "In a single day 

 a chickadee will sometimes eat more than four hun- 

 dred eggs of the apple plant-louse," says Professor 



1 80 



