196 Birds Every Child Should Know 
sapholes. When not alarmed, his only movement 
was from one row of holes to another, and he 
tended them with considerable regularity. As 
the day wore on he became less excitable, and 
clung cloddishly to his tree trunk with ever in- 
creasing torpidity, until finally he hung motion- 
less as if intoxicated, tippling in sap, a 
dishevelled, smutty, silent bird, stupefied with 
drink, with none of that brilliancy of plumage 
and light-hearted gaiety which made him the 
noisiest and most conspicuous bird of our 
April woods.” 
But it must be admitted that very rarely does 
the sapsucker girdle a tree with holes enough to 
sap away its life. He may have an orgie of in- 
temperance once in awhile, but much should be 
forgiven a bird as dexterous as a flycatcher in 
taking insects on the wing and with a hearty 
appetite for pests. Wild fruit and soft-shelled 
nuts he likes too. He never bores a tree to get 
insects as his cousins do, for only when a nest 
must be chiselled out is he a wood pecker in the 
strict sense. 
You may know this erring one by the pale, 
sulphur-yellow tinge on his white under parts, 
the white patch above the tail on his mottled 
black and white back, his spotted wings with 
conspicuous white coverts, the broad black patch 
on his breast extending to the comers of his 
mouth in a chin strap, and the lines of crimso* 
