394 
BIRDS OF NEW MEXICO 
was busy storing away his winter supply of acorns. Occasionally he 
picked a fallen acorn from the ground; more often he flew into the lesser 
branches of the oak, and hanging like a great black chickadee he plucked 
the acorn from the cup. With crow-like flappings, his broad wings car¬ 
ried him back to the dead cottonwood with his prize in his bill. Alight¬ 
ing somewhat below the summit of his tree he would, by a series of flight 
jumps, come to a certain shattered stub where a fissure formed a vise. 
Into this he would wedge the acorn. 
“With the acorn held firmly in place he would set about cutting away 
the hull, and strong strokes of his bill would soon split away the shell and 
expose the kernel. But he was not satisfied in merely making the kernel 
accessible, he must go on with his pounding until he had broken it into 
several pieces, and then with a piece in his bill he would dive into the air 
like a gymnast, drop twenty or thirty feet and come with an upward 
swoop to perch on the trunk of the same tree. A few hitching movements 
would bring him to a deep crack that opened into the heart of the tree. 
Here he would carefully poke away, for future reference, his morsel. 
Usually the acorn was cut into four parts, involving four such trips, and 
on the last trip to the vise he would take the empty hull in his bill, and 
with a jerk of his head, toss it into the air. An examination of the ground 
beneath the tree disclosed hundreds of empty acorn shells. Holding a 
watch on the Lewis Woodpecker, we found that he made five trips in 
five minutes and stored five acorns” (1926, p. 69). Major Bendire also 
quotes an instance of numbers of May flies being gathered and stuck in 
cracks in the bark of the nesting trees of the Lewis. Here, of course, the 
problem is a different one, as the insects could be eaten before the birds 
left the neighborhood. 
The real questions raised by what seems to be a quasi-storing habit in 
the Lewis Woodpecker are the utility of the storing habit in migratory 
birds and the correlation of the two habits—the question whether the 
storing habit could have antedated the migratory habit, leaving an out¬ 
grown instinct such as is seen in the case of nut-fed squirrels who 
continue to store regardless of their needs; a question which raises still 
another—will the outgrown instinct gradually disappear? 
Additional Literature.—Finley, W. L., Educational Leaflet 112, Nat. 
Assoc. Audubon Soc. 
RED-NAPED SAPSUCKER: Sphyrapicus varius nuchalis Baird 
Description. — Length: 8-8.7 inches, wing (male) 4.9-5.1, tail 3.1-3.4, bill 
.9-1. Inner hind toe extremely short. Adult male: Back of head black between 
red of crown and nape ; rest of upperparts black, back with two broken white stripes, 
tail black, middle feathers white with oblique black bars; wing coverts with long 
conspicuous white patch t primaries banded with white; sides of head with white 
stripes; chest with a black band between red of throat and pale yell-ow of belly. In 
fall and winter: White markings on upperparts of s immer male replaced by yellowish 
