108 ANNUAL REPORT. 
legislature to change it to Tree Benefactors. Mr. Clay is right. If any 
additional argument in their defence is needed, let me ask objectors to 
examine the bills and tongues of the two species of woodpecker which are 
indiscriminately called by the misnomer, sapsuckers, and see if it is possi- 
ble for them to suck up with one or sop up with the other the sap, as 
charged. Their bills are not air tight, the mandibles not being so closely 
opposed as to make them a perfect tube, and a considerable portion of their 
tongues is hard and hornlike, while the extremity is very acute and attenu- 
ated, forbidding their adaptation to sopping up a fluid. As numerous dis- 
sections, while revealing their insectivorous habits, have failed to find the 
‘‘ liber” or inner bark of any species of tree, they must be exhonorated from 
this charge also. But still further, in their defence, let me say that the 
time for them to get sap and inner bark is spring, when both abound, and 
when we certainly should expect a good appetite for them in the diminished 
supply of insectivorous force; but the boring is donein autumn. And let us 
now and forever do the sapsuckers justice by exhonorating them from the 
fowl aspersion. Very truly yours, 
’ P..L. HATCH: 
P. S.—I am greatly obliged for the Report, for which accept acknowledg- 
ments. jel ye le 
THE BORER AND SAPSUCKER. 
The paragraph referred to by Dr. Hatch was as follows: 
I desire to call the attention of your readers to the grave errors which 
exjst about the sapsuckers and apple-tree borers. Sapsuckers are insect- 
ivorous, and live mostly upon the larve of insects, burrowing in rotten 
wood of trees and stumps. They also search the bark of trees, and are 
fond of the apple-tree borer—thrusting their long, hard bills into the borer_ 
holes, and eating the grubs. Sapsuckers have greatly decreased within my 
memory, and borers and other vermin have greatly increased. So that 
whole orchards are destroyed, and sound fruit is exceedingly rare. The 
error is in killing the birds and fostering the vermin. No idea is more com- 
mon in our State than that the sapsucker perforates the bark of trees, and 
sucks the sap, and eats the soft under-bark. This is a totalerror. My 
apple orchard has been almost entirely destroyed in the last 20 years by the 
borer, and a half dozen sapsuckers are hardly seen in a season. 
The borer, a species of beetle, winters in the rough bark of trees, lays its 
eggs in regular rows aroufd the apple-tree, and these, when they are hatched, 
penetrate the soft bark, and then are transformed again into the beetle. 
The trees about my doors have, this year, been bored, and not a single sap- 
sucker, the red-breasted or any other species, has been seen, but on my 
box. No large animal feeds in mathematical lines; but many insects, as 
the bee, bdrer, locust, etc., do use these lines in depositing their eggs. So 
that we have experience and analogy in favor of the beetle theory, and all 
against the instinct and habits of the sapsuckers. The same class of observ- 
ers accuse the crow, (because they are found among the sheep feeding upon 
the placentas, or after-births, of the ewes) of killing lambs. Now, last 
