Length: About 8½ inches, larger than the Downy, and smaller than the Red-headed woodpecker.

General Appearance: A medium-sized bird, with bars, stripes, and patches of black and white. The scarlet crown, the black band across the breast, and the scarlet throat of the males are distinguishing marks.

Male: Crown and throat bright red; bill long; head with broad black and white stripes, extending to neck. The black stripe beginning at bill unites with a black crescent that encloses red throat. Breast and belly light yellow; sides gray, streaked with black; back black, barred with white; wings black, with large white patches, white bars, and spots; middle tail-feathers, white and black; outer tail-feathers mostly black.

Female: Resembles male, but throat is usually white instead of scarlet.

Young: Similar to parents, but with dull blackish crowns, whitish throats, and brownish-gray breasts.

Notes: A faint call-note; a ringing call, consisting of several similar notes.

Habitat: Tree-trunks, into which these birds drill holes and thus kill the trees.

Range: Eastern North America. Breeds from the tree-belt of Canada to northern Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, mountains of Massachusetts and North Carolina; winters from Pennsylvania and Ohio Valley to the Gulf Coast, Bahamas, Cuba, and Costa Rica.

The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is the renegade of the woodpecker family—the transgressor that has called down anathemas upon all his tribe. He does more damage in some localities than others. Mr. Forbush reports that while the sapsucker has undoubtedly killed trees in northern New England where he breeds, yet in thirty years he has done no appreciable harm in Massachusetts.

Dr. Henry Henshaw, formerly Chief of the Biological Survey, writes: “The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, unlike other woodpeckers, does comparatively little good and much harm.” Mr. Henshaw reports 250 kinds of trees known to have been attacked by sapsuckers and left with “girdles of holes” or “blemishes known as bird-pecks, especially numerous in hickory, oak, cypress, and yellow poplar.”[79]

The experience of Dr. Sylvester Judd at Marshall Hall, Maryland, was as follows: “In the summer of 1895 there was on the Bryan farm a little orchard of nine apple trees, about twelve years old, that appeared perfectly healthy. In the fall sapsuckers tapped them in many places, and during spring and fall of the next four years they resorted to them regularly for supplies of sap. Observations were made (October 15, 1896) of two sapsuckers in adjoining trees of the orchard. From a point twenty feet distant they were watched for three hours with powerful glasses to see whether they fed to any considerable extent on ants or other insects that were running over the tree-trunks. In that time one bird seized an ant and the other snapped at some flying insect. One drank sap from the holes thirty and the other forty-one times. Later in the day, one drilled two new holes and the other five. The holes were made in more or less regular rings about the trunk, one ring close above another, for a distance of six to eight inches. The drills were about a quarter of an inch deep, and penetrated the bark and the outer part of the wood.

“In November, 1900, seven of the nine trees were dead and the others were dying. The loss of sap must have been an exhausting drain, but it was not the sole cause of death. Beetles of the flat-headed apple-borer, attracted by the exuding sap, had oviposited in the holes, and the next generation, having thus gained an entrance, had finished the deadly work begun by the sapsuckers.”[80]

Mr. W. L. McAtee, of the Biological Survey, made the following report on sapsuckers: “These birds have short, brushy tongues not adapted to the capture of insects, while the other woodpeckers have tongues with barbed tips which can be extended to spear luckless borers or other insects whose burrows in the wood have been reached by their powerful beaks. The sapsuckers practically do not feed on wood-borers or other forest enemies. Their chief insect food is ants. About 15 per cent. of their diet consists of cambium and the inner bark of trees, and they drink a great deal of sap.

“The parts of the tree injured by sapsuckers are those that carry the rich sap which nourishes the growing wood and bark. Sapsucker pecking disfigures ornamental trees, giving rise to pitch streams, gummy excrescences, and deformities of the trunks. Small fruit trees, especially the apple, are often killed, and whole young orchards have been destroyed.

“These birds inflict much greater financial loss by producing defects in the wood of the far larger number of trees which they work upon but do not kill. Blemishes frequently render the trees unfit for anything except coarse construction and fuel.

“Hickory trees are favorites of sapsuckers. It is estimated that about 10 per cent. of the merchantable material is left in the woods on account of bird pecks. On this basis the annual loss on hickory is about $600,000. To this must be added the loss on timber by the manufacturer.”[81]

It is no wonder that war has been declared upon sapsuckers; but it is very sad that because of a lack of careful observation of the distinctive markings of tree-trunk birds, many useful woodpeckers, especially the Downy and Hairy, have been sacrificed.

Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers may be readily identified by a broad white stripe extending down the center of the back, a small patch of red on the back of the head, pure white throats and breasts, and wings barred with white. A red forehead and crown (and red throat of males), a black crescent across the breast, large white patches on the wings, a back with black and white bars instead of a white streak, differentiate this sapsucker from the Downy and Hairy woodpeckers. The yellow belly is not a conspicuous “field-mark.”

There are several species of sapsucker in the West. The YELLOW-BELLIED is found in western Texas; the RED-NAPED SAPSUCKER in the Rocky Mt. region, from British Columbia to northwestern Mexico, and from Colorado and Montana to the Cascade and Sierra Nevada Mts.; the RED-BREASTED SAPSUCKER in the Canadian forests of the Pacific Coast region, from Alaska to Lower California, east to the Cascades and Sierra Nevadas; and the WILLIAMSON SAPSUCKER, from the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mts. westward to the Pacific, and from Arizona and New Mexico to British Columbia.[82] The last-named species is a great devourer of ants.

MOURNING DOVE