256 USEFUL BIRDS. 



the larvEe and pupse of this weevil. He does not, however, 

 name the birds. 1 



I have seen many shoots from which this insect had been 

 removed by birds, and most of them showed the character- 

 istic work of this Woodpecker. Some other Woodpeckers 

 and the Chickadee are probably useful in this respect. The 

 Downy Woodpecker hunts borers to the very twigs. Mr. 

 Kirkland saw a mother bird pecking away at twigs infested 

 by the oak pruner, taking out the larvae and feeding them 

 to her j^oung. 



There is some reason for calling the Downy a sapsucker. 

 Occasionally he is accused of tapping the smaller limbs and 

 twigs of maples and other trees for their sap. Nuttall says 

 he has seen the bird drinking sap from the trees, and that it 

 bores into the wax myrtle for that purpose. I have never 

 been able to observe this, and ornithologists generally deny 

 that it is a fact. But Mr. Bailey's observations seem to 

 prove that the farmer is not altogether wrong in his appella- 

 tion of the bird. The habit, however, seems to be not a 

 common one. Mr. Bailey's experience has been spoken of 

 in a paper read before the American Ornithologists' Union, 

 and in another published in the annual report of the secretary 

 of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture for 1900 ; 

 but I am now able to present cuts from drawings of two 

 stems tapped by the Downy, which show the ingenious 

 method employed by the bird, also how its perforations 

 differ from those made by the Sapsucker. The quotation 

 from Mr. Bailey's field notes follows : — 



At 12.30 I found a Downy Woodpecker, and watched him till 2.45 ; 

 he took three larvae from a maple stub, just under the bark. He next 

 tapped two small swamp maples, four and six feet from the ground, 

 and spent most of the time taking sap. He tapped the tree by pecking 

 it a few times very lightly ; it looked like a slight cut, slanting a little. 

 The bird would sit and peck the sap out of the lower part of the cut. 

 The cut was so small the sap did not collect very fast. The bird would 

 go and sit for a long time in a large tree, then it would come back and 

 take more sap. It did this three times while I was watching it. It did 



1 Insects Injurious to Forest and Shade Trees, by A. S. Packard. Fifth 

 Report of the United States Entomological Commission, quotation from Fitch, 

 p. 740. 



