Sphyrapious varius . 
Concord, 
1895, 
Oct .6. 
! 
Cambridge 
1899. 
October . 
Mass . 
Among some second-growth oaks near Bateman’s Pond this 
afternoon I came upon a young Sap sue her , a very tame bird who 
allowed me to get within a few yards of him although he to oh 
pains to heep a tree trunk between us most of the time peep- 
ing out from behind it with a sly, saucy expression lihe a 
Squirrel as it struck me. The species is the slowest and most 
clumsy climber of our Woodpeckers. He is also much given to 
fits of pensiveness or abstraction when he seems to be quite 
oblivious to what is going on around him. I have seen only 
few Sapsuckers in eastern Massachusetts within the past ten 
years - not more than one or two in any one season and often 
none during the entire season. Probably this is because I 
have spent so much of my time in Concord where they appear to 
occur much less often than in the region about Cambridge. 
, The Garden, Mass. 
One seen oy me on the 4th, 5th, 10th & 11th (W.B. ) and 
one by W. Deane on the 13th, probably the same bird on each 
occasion. I cannot recall noting this species in our garden 
before for over thirty years. The bird which visited us this 
autumn spent most of his time in the large apple trees and did 
not, so far as I could discover, sink any of his sap wells in 
my birches or mountain ashes. 
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