“Yet sometimes I peek while I play hide-and-seek If you’re nice I shall wish to see you; I’ll make a faint sound and come quite around And creep like a mouse in full view, Very much like a mouse to your view.” —Garrett Newkirk, in _Bird-Lore_. “I guess I know what the other tree-trunk birds are, Gray Lady; they’re Woodpeckers,” said little Bobby, who seemed to have grown taller and broader ever since the day that Jacob had put a jack-knife in his hand and taught him to carve a wooden spoon, and he felt himself to be a full-fledged boy. “Some Woodpeckers are pretty bad, though, ’cause grandpa caught a whole bunch of ’em early last spring sucking the juice out of the apple trees in the young orchard, and Uncle Bill, over the mountain, said they did the same to his sugar-maples. I saw what they did, myself, and you can see, too, if you stop up at our house some time when you are passing, for the marks are there,—little round holes, all in rows so as they make squares like the peppery holey plasters grandma wears for a lame back. They were awfully pretty birds, too—all red on the head and neck, and black and white speckled on top, and yellow underneath, and black across the front. I had a good chance to see it, ’cause grandpop was hoppin’ mad and tried to shoot them, and he did get one of the prettiest of them all. Some of them that were on the apple tree didn’t have so many colours in their feathers.” “Perhaps those were females,” said Sarah Barnes. “Yes, the paler ones are the females and lack the red throat and sometimes the red head-feathers, also,” said Gray Lady, “for this bird is called the Sapsucker, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, because it has, as Bobby has told us, the bad habit of not only boring into trees for insects, but sucking the sap as well, and when a number of them are found together, of course, they are likely to do harm. Still, to my mind, the very worst that they do is to give a bad name to the family of the most industrious insect-eating birds that we have. “Even though this Sapsucker takes enough sap to have earned his title, he keeps up the family record as an insect eater, for he has a form of the pointed tongue with hooked bristles on the end, like all Woodpeckers, and this weapon acts both as a spear and trap to catch insects. Then, too, the Sapsucker is not a permanent resident, like many of his family, but nests early in the most northerly states and travels about during a great part of the year. As he can only suck sap during the growing season, and eats insects the year around, besides many wild berries—such as those of poison ivy, dogwood, etc.—that are of no use to us, I think he should be forgiven his sip of fresh spring sap, except where, as in the case of Bobby’s grandfather, he is caught in the act of hurting valuable trees. THE SAPSUCKER