354 MICHIGAN BIRD LIFE. 
velvet black chest band, but the throat and chin of the female are white. 
Distribution.—Eastern North. America north to about latitude 634°, 
breeding from Massachusetts northward; south in winter to the West 
Indies, Mexico and Costa Rica. 
The Sapsucker is an abundant migrant in most parts of the state and 
doubtless breeds regularly everywhere in the state except perhaps in the 
southernmost three tiers of counties; even there it may nest occasionally 
(one record for Monroe county). Farther northward it is a regular summer 
resident becoming more numerous over the upper part of the Lower Penin- 
sula and throughout the Upper Peninsula. It seems to prefer hardwood 
growths and deciduous trees, although it is by no means absent from pine 
regions. Ordinarily it appears from the south during the first half of April, 
from the 1st to the 5th in the southern part of the state, and from the 12th 
to the 20th farther north. It moves southward somewhat irregularly but 
seems to be most abundant during the latter half of August. Occasionally 
a few individuals spend the winter with us. 
It is by no means a noisy bird, and as its tattoo closely resembles that of 
other species, it may easily pass unnoticed unless attention is especially 
called to it. It is our single woodpecker which is always mischievous, 
and probably is the one least deserving of protection at the hands of the 
fruit grower, farmer and forester. Its well known habit of perforating 
the bark of fruit and shade trees with innumerable squarish holes, from 
which it first extracts the soft inner bark or cambium and later drinks the 
flowing sap, has given it the name of Sapsucker, to which it is fully entitled. 
Many ingenious theories have been advanced to account for this remarkable 
habit, but the simple truth of the matter is that the holes are made solely 
to get the inner bark and the sap, never for the purpose of extracting insects 
from the tree. True, the bird eats freely the insects which are subsequently 
attracted by the flowing sap, but this is no part of the original plan. The 
trees thus attacked are of various kinds, and probably at one time and 
another almost every species of forest and orchard tree is attacked, but the 
bird shows a particular fondness for the Scotch and Norway (red) pines, the 
sugar maple, apple, pear, mountain ash, haw and white birch. 
The late Frank Bolles gives the following summary of the habits of the 
Sapsucker as observed by him in New Hampshire, from April to October, 
in 1889 and 1890: ‘From these observations I draw the following con- 
clusions: The Yellow-bellied Woodpecker is in the habit for successive 
years of drilling the canoe birch, red maple, red oak, white ash, and probably 
other trees for the purpose of taking from them the elaborated sap and in 
some cases parts of the cambium layer; that the birds consume the sap 
in large quantities for its own sake and not for insect matter which such sap 
may chance occasionally to contain; that the sap attracts many insects 
of various species, a few of which form a considerable part of the food of 
this bird, but whose capture does not occupy its time to anything like the 
extent to which sap drinking occupies it; that different families of these 
Woodpeckers occupy different orchards, such families consisting of a male, 
female and from one to four or five young birds; that the orchards consist 
of several trees usually only a few rods apart, and that these trees are 
regularly and constantly visited from sunrise until long after sunset, not 
only by the woodpeckers themselves, but by numerous parasitical humming- 
birds, which are sometimes unmolested but probably quite as often repelled; 
that the forest trees attacked by them generally die, possibly in the second 
