20 WISCONSIN BIRD-STUDY BULLETIN. 



tasteful to the red-throat, on the contrary he likes it and varies his 

 diet by eating the visitors in large numbers. 



In the spring the sapsucker shows himself to be what all birds arc — 

 great drinkers. At this season he may turn on the tap for a while, 

 but the rest of the year, like the other birds, he nmst find running or 

 standing water cr do as the oriole does, tap some kind of juicy fruit as 

 the apple cr grape. This ought to be a suggestion to the bird-lover 

 and the fruit grower. If you wish to attract the birds aboiit the 

 hom^e, or to keep them from injuring the fruit, follow Mr. Lawrencf 

 Bruner's advice* and keep a pan of water where they may freely use 

 it for drinking and bathing. 



Sometimes the sapsucker is injurious to trees. He strips the outar 

 bark off to get at the inner bark; sometimes he drills so many holes 

 that the tree is really girdled and set back in its gro%^'th or even killed. 

 But when we note how many of the great, thrifty basswoods, poplars, 

 hickories and red-elms have had the smallpox and are covered V\ith 

 pitSj we conclude that the bird is not as harmful as some people sup- 

 pose him to be. 



You v/ould' think that when the woodpeckers had once mastered the 

 art of digging their facd out of the limbs and trunks of trees they 

 would stick to their trade, but at least two o-f them do not. The flicker 

 and the sapsucker have departed from the ways of their fathers and 

 have learned to prefer ants to vfood-boring grubs. The flicker is Ihe 

 greatest ant-eater among "Wisconsin birds and the sapsucker is nexL. 

 Over one-third of his food consists of ants. 



The regular woodpecker tongTie is a barbed spear and is used for 

 piercing grubs and drawing them from their burrows for food. Not 

 so the tongue of the sapsucker. His tongue is brushy at the end^ like 

 that of the flicker, and is m.uch better for getting sap from pits and 

 ants from their holes than a spear-pointed tongue would be. 



'The Oriole," in Notes on Nebraska Birds, Lawrence Bruner. 



