WOODPECKERS: ROCKY MOUNTAIN SAPSUCKER 397 
and the extent of the damage they are doing in the region. If the total 
injury is serious it is peculiarly important to recognize them as the 
offenders and not visit their sins upon the innocent conservators of the 
forest. If necessary to do away with them locally they may be readily 
poisoned by putting powdered strychnine into the fresh sap pits. If 
fresh girdles are watched the birds may be found at their vigils, sipping 
sap and eating the insects their sugar-baited traps have decoyed. One 
of the Red-naped Sapsuckers shot in Santa Clara canyon, when feeding 
around a reddish zone of fresh holes in a birch, had its stomach full of 
small insects. 
On Pueblo Creek, near Taos, where a pair were feeding young out 
of the nest, my attention was attracted by seeing one of the parents 
repeatedly fly obliquely from the tree to the ground, and on investigation 
I discovered an ants 7 nest. At that time the birds, so noisy earlier in the 
season, were, of course, guardedly quiet, giving for the most part only a 
weak call. 
In summer, Mr. Ridgway found, the Red-napes’ favorite haunts 
are the groves of large aspens. In summer, at Santa Fe, Mr. Jensen has 
often found them visiting the Indian School campus (1923b, p. 457). 
Additional Literature.—McAtee, W. L., Biol. Surv., U. S. Dept. Agr., Bull. 
39, Plate I and pp. 98-99, 1911.— Saunders, A. A., Condor, XII, 200, 1910. 
ROCKY MOUNTAIN SAPSUCKER: Sphyrapicus thryoideus nataliae (Malherbe) 
Plate 38 
Description. — Length: 9-9.7 inches. Adult male: Upperpdrts black with large 
white rump and wing patches; sides of head with white streaks; throat with red stripe , 
chest, black; belly yellow; iris reddish brown, bill black in summer, purplish slaty 
brown in winter, legs and feet grayish olive. Adult female: Entire body barred with 
brown or black and white, except for brown head, white rump, and, rarely, a red 
median stripe on throat; chest usually with a black patch; middle of belly yellow. 
Young male: Color pattern like that of adult male, but black duller (often marked 
with white on back), throat stripe white, breast and belly paler, sides and flanks 
barred with dusky. Young female: Similar to adult female, but bars less sharply 
defined, color areas paler, and black patch always (?) wanting. 
Range. —Breeds in Upper Transition and Canadian mountain forests from 
southern Montana south to New Mexico and Arizona; winters in Arizona, New 
Mexico, western Texas, and south to Jalisco, Mexico. 
State Records. —The Rocky Mountain form of the Williamson Sapsucker 
breeds at high altitudes in the quaking aspens in the mountains of New Mexico. 
A nest was found at 9,800 feet west of Las Yegas May 30, 1898 (Mitchell). [It 
was nesting commonly in the Carson Forest west of Tres Piedras about 8,000 feet 
(1916-1918), fairly commonly in the Sangre de Cristo Range from 9,000-10,000 feet 
(1919), and several nests containing young were found in the divide country between 
Pot Creek and Rio Chiquito southeast of Taos June 20-26, 1919, from 9,000-9,500 
feet (Ligon). At Lake Burford, it was fairly common and nesting, May to June, 
1918 (Wetmore); and at 8,000 feet in the Black Range, 20 miles west of Hcrmosa, a 
nest was found on July 6, 1917, in an aspen among dense conifers (Ligon).1 The 
