PERSONA NON GRATA 43 



he became less excitable, and clung cloddishly to 

 his tree-trunk with ever increasing torpidity, until 

 finally he hung motionless as if intoxicated, tip- 

 pling in sap, a disheveled, smutty, silent bird, 

 stupefied with drink, with none of that brilliancy 

 of plumage and light-hearted gayety which made 

 him the noisiest and most conspicuous bird of our 

 April woods. 



Our mountain ash trees have told us several 

 facts about the sapsucker : 



That he did not come to eat insects. 



That he did come to drink sap, and that he 

 probably ate the inner bark also. 



That he drank the sap because he liked it, 

 not for some secondary object, as insects. 



That he could detect difference in the quality 

 or quantity of the sap, which caused him to 

 prefer a particular tree. 



That this difference apparently was in the 

 taste of the sap, and that the effects of a day's 

 drinking of mountain ash sap seemed to indi- 

 cate some intoxicant or narcotic quality in the 

 sap of that particular tree. 



That the effect of his work upon the tree 

 was apparently injurious, as it is the only cause 

 assigned of a healthy tree's dying before a less 

 healthy one of the same age and species, subject 

 all its life to the same conditions. 



