258 RIVERBY 



Later in the day I examined the supposed hair with 

 my pocket glass, and found it was not hair, but some 

 vegetable fibre. My next conclusion was that the 

 birds had not been molested, but that they were 

 furnishing their apartment, and some of the material 

 had stuck to the door jambs. This proved to be the 

 correct inference. The chickadee makes a little felt- 

 like mat or carpet with which it covers the bottom 

 of the nest-cavity. A day or two later, in my vine- 

 yard near by, I found where a piece of heavy twine 

 that held a young grapevine to a stake had been 

 pulled down to the ground and picked and beaten, 

 and parts of it reduced to its original tow. Here, 

 doubtless, the birds had got some of their carpeting 

 material. 



I recently read in a work on ornithology that the 

 rings of small holes which we see in the trunks and 

 limbs of perfectly sound apple-trees are made by 

 woodpeckers in search of grubs and insects. This 

 is a hasty inference. These holes are made by wood- 

 peckers, but the food they obtain at the bottom of 

 them is not the flesh of worm or insect, but the 

 flesh of the apple-tree — the soft, milky inner bark. 

 The same writer says these holes are not hurtful to 

 the tree, but conducive to its health. Yet I have 

 seen the limbs of large apple-trees nearly killed by 

 being encompassed by numerous rings of large, deep 

 holes made by the yellow-bellied woodpecker. This 

 bird drills holes in the sugar maple in the spring for 

 the sap. I have known him to spend the greater 

 part of a bright March day on the sunny side of a 



