No, 3.] Reprints and Miscellaneous Notes. 169 



dollar, with narrow strips of peel between them. The pulp had 

 been eaten out quite to the middle of the fruit. Small pieces of rind 

 were thickly strewn about the spot.'' Upon searching closely he 

 discovered several other oranges that had been attacked in a similar 

 manner. All were partially decayed and were lying on the ground. 

 He was unable to find any on the trees which showed any marks of 

 the woodpecker's bill.^ 



Mr. Benjamin Mortimer, writing of the same bird at Sanford, Fla., 

 says : 



During February and March 1889 while gathering fruit or pruning orange 

 trees, I frequently found oranges that had been riddled by this woodpecker, and 

 repeatedly saw the bird at work. I never observed it feeding upon fallen oranges. 

 It helped itself freely to sound fruit that still hung on the trees, and in some 

 instances I have found ten or twelve oranges on one tree that had been tapped 

 by it. Where an orange accidentally rested on a branch in such a way as to 

 make the flower end accessible from above or from a horizontal direction, the 

 woodpecker chose that spot, as through it he could reach into all the sections of the 

 fruit, and when this was the case there was but one hole in the orange. But 

 usually there were many holes around it. It appeared that after having once com- 

 menced on an orange the wood-pecker returned to the same one repeatedly until 

 he had completely consumed the pulp, and then he usually attacked another very 

 near to it. Thus I have found certain clusters in which every orange had been 

 bored, while all the others on the tree were untouched. An old orange grower 

 told me that the " Sap-suckers," as he called them, never touch any but very ripe 

 oranges, and are troublesome only to such growers as reserved their crops for the 

 late market. He also said that it is only within a very few years that they have 

 shown a taste for the fruit ; and I myself observed that, although Red-bellies were 

 very common in the neighbourhood, only an individual, or perhaps a pair, visited 

 any one grove.' 



YELLOW-BELLIED WOODPECKER OR SAPSUCKER. 



{Sphyrapicus varius.) 



This species is probably the most migratory of all our wood- 

 peckers, breeding only in the most northerly parts of the United 

 States, and in some of the mountains farther south. In the fall it 

 ranges southward, spending the winter in most of the Eastern 

 States. It is less generally distributed than some of the other wood- 

 peckers, being quite unknown in some sections and very abundant 

 in others. For instance, Dr. C. Hart Merriam states that in the 

 Adirondack region during migration it outnumbers all other species 

 of the family together, and throughout the summer is second in num- 

 bers only to the Hairy Woodpecker ; and at Mount Chocorua, New 



» The Auk, Vol. vi, 1889, pp. 337—338. 

 - The Auk, Vol. vii, 1890, p. 340. 



