for her
response. As it came back timidly but promptly, he left his perch and
sought a nearer acquaintance with the prudent female. Whether or not a
match grew out of this little flirtation I cannot say.

Our smaller woodpeckers are sometimes accused of injuring the apple
and other fruit trees, but the depredator is probably the larger and
rarer yellow-bellied species. One autumn I caught one of these fellows
in the act of sinking long rows of his little wells in the limb of an
apple-tree. There were series of rings of them, one above another,
quite around the stem, some of them the third of an inch across. They
are evidently made to get at the tender, juicy bark, or cambium layer,
next to the hard wood of the tree. The health and vitality of the
branch are so seriously impaired by them that it often dies.

In the following winter the same bird (probably) tapped a maple-tree
in front of my window in fifty-six places; and when the day was sunny,
and the sap oozed out, he spent most of his time there. He knew the
good sap-days, and was on hand promptly for his tipple; cold and
cloudy days he did not appear. He knew which side of the tree to tap,
too, and avoided the sunless northern exposure. When one series of
well-holes failed to supply him, he would sink another, drilling
through the bark with great ease and quickness. Then, when the day was
warm, and the sap ran freely, he would have a regular sugar-maple
debauch, sitting there by his wells hour after hour, and as fast as
they became filled sipping out the sap. This he did in a gentle,
caressing manner that was very suggestive. He made a row of wells near
the foot of the tree, and other rows higher up, and he would hop up
and down the trunk as these became filled. He would hop down the tree
backward with the utmost ease, throwing his tail outward and his head
inward at each hop. When the wells would freeze up or his thirst
become slaked, he would ruffle his feathers, draw himself together,
and sit and doze in the sun on the side of the tree. He passed the
night in a hole in an apple-tree not far off. He was evidently a young
bird, not yet having the plumage of the mature male or female, and yet
he knew which tree to tap and where to tap it. I saw where he had
bored several maples in the vicinity, but no oaks or chestnuts. I
nailed up a fat bone near his sap-works: the downy woodpecker came
there several times a day to dine; the nuthatch came, and even the
snowbird