432 



NATURAL HISTORY OF BIRDS. 



not stop to consider the trifling injury they may cause by, in a few exceptional cases, 

 boring holes in the weather-boarding of houses in order to store their acorns away, 

 or digging breeding-holes in wooden church-steeples ; but there is one small group of 

 woodpeckers which, on account of their organization and their chief food, may be 

 regarded as perhaps mostly injurious viz., the so-called sap-suckers (Sphyrapicus). 

 In these, the hyoid bones are not so excessively elongated, and the tongue conse- 

 quently is protrusible only in a very slight degree. The tip is also differently armed, 

 being simply brushed and not barbed, features which indicate that the food of 

 these birds is different from the rest of the woodpeckers, consisting as it chiefly does 

 of the sap of the trees. The late Dr. Alfred E. Brehm was an enthusiastic defender of 



: : 



FIG. 217. Jynx torquilla, wryneck. 



the woodpeckers. When, two years ago, shortly before his death, he visited this 

 country, as we were standing at the entrance to the Smithsonian Institution, nearly 

 driven to despair by the incessant din of the English sparrows which tried to drown 

 our voices, he asked me to show him a characteristic American bird. Just at that 

 moment a bird alighted on the trunk of the nearest tree, and I had the satisfaction of 

 pointing out to him our common yellow-bellied sap-sucker (/& variits). As the bird 

 reached the first branch, it thrust its bill into the smooth bark, leaving a square hole, 

 easily visible from the moist sap which made it look dark against the dusty surface ; 

 and tap-tap-tap-tap, with an astonishing regularity and in a most business-like manner, 

 the little fellow punctured the trunk horizontally and vertically until the tree looked 

 as if it had suffered from small-pox, and ' Bird ' Brehm, who had watched the per- 



