RED-BELLIED WOODPECKEE. 49 



for several minutes pecked at it in a slow deliberate way. When I showed myself 

 he at once took flight and sought shelter in the dense foliage of the trees above. Upon 

 examining the orange I found that it was decayed through the whole of one side. In 

 the sound portion were three holes, each nearly as large as a silver dollar, with narrow 

 strips of peel between them. The pulp had been eaten out quite to the middle of the 

 fruit. Small pieces of the rind were thickly strewn about the spot. Upon searching 

 closely I discovered several other oranges that had been attacked in a similar manner. 

 All were partially decayed and were lying on the ground. 1 was unable to find any 

 on the trees which showed any marks of the woodpecker's bill. The owner of this 

 grove was surprised when 1 called his attention to the above facts, which were quite 

 new to him. Nor had any of the other orange growers in the neighborhood any knowl- 

 edge of this orange-eating habit of the red-bellied woodpecker.' 



Mr. Mortimer also gives testimony upon this habit of the bird ; 



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 10 or 12 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 ap- 

 peared that having once commenced on an orange the woodpecker 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 "sapsuckers,"' as he called them, never touch any 

 but very ripe oranges and are troublesome only to such growers as reserve 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 neighborhood, only an individual, or perhaps a pair, visited any 

 one grove. In one case a pair took up their station in a dead pine near a grove and 

 made excursions after the fruit at all hours of the day, being easily located by the noise 

 they kept up.^ 



Dr. B. H. Warren states that the stomachs of three red-bellied wood- 

 peckers captured in winter in Chester and Delaware Counties, Pa., 

 contained black beetles, larvae, fragments of acorns, and a few seeds 

 of wild grapes. The stomachs of eight adults from the St. Johns River, 

 Florida, contained red seeds of two species of palmetto, but no insects. 

 Tv^■o additional stomachs from the same locality contained palmetto 

 berries, fragments of crickets {Nemohius and Orocharis saltator), a 

 palmetto ant (Oamponotus escuriens), and numerous joints of a 

 myriapod, probably Julus} 



Dr. Townend Glover found in the stomach of a red-bellied wood- 

 pecker killed in December "pieces of acorns, seeds, and gravel, but no 

 insects. Another, shot in December, contained wing cases oiBuprestis, 



1 Brewster, William, Auk, VI, 337-338, 1889. 



! Mortimer, D. Auk, VII, 339-340, 1890. 



3 Birds ol Pennsylvania, ed. 2, pp. 174, 178, 1890. 



75713°— Bull. 37—11 4 



