The red-breasted sapsucker does puncture trees and drink sap both in summer and winter. In summer it attacks in this fashion not only pine, fir, aspen, alder, cottonwood and willow trees, but such orchard trees as apple, pear, prune and the like, as may lie within Transition areas. In winter at lower levels it gives attention to evergreen trees, white birch, mountain ash, peach, plum, apricot, English walnut, elder, and pepper trees. * * * Instead of gleaning at random, as we might expect, the Sapsucker makes careful selection, like a prudent forester, of a single tree, and confines his attentions henceforth, even though it be through succeeding seasons, to that one tree. Starting well toward the top of an evergreen, or well up on the major branches of an orchard tree, the bird works successively downward in perpendicular rows, whose borings are sometimes confluent. In this way the bird secures an ever-fresh flow of sap, from below. If carried on too extensively, or persisted in for successive seasons, these operations will sometimes cause a tree to bleed fatally, or at least to fall easy victim to insect pests. I have myself seen limbs of mountain ash trees, pear trees, and English walnut, done to death in this fashion. Yet it is only fair to say that but one or two trees in an orchard may be attacked, and there is scarcely more danger of the trouble spreading than there would be from successive strokes of lightning. * * * For the rest, _Sphyrapicus ruber_ is a large consumer of ants, and does some good in the destruction of leaf-eating beetles. Berries of the pepper trees (_Schinus molle_) are eaten to some extent, in winter, as are also, regrettably, seeds of the poison oak. W. Otto Emerson (1893) says: “One I watched every morning from my tent fly to the top of a tall burnt tree and rap its roll-call as a kind of warning may be to the flying insects. It would then sail out like a flycatcher, catch an insect, and return to the burnt tree-top. Its movements were very graceful and regular. As it dipped or circled around for this or that insect the sunlight catching on the red breast lit it up like a patch of flame.” He says elsewhere (1899): “One I found in a willow tree trying to get the best of a yellow jacket’s nest, dodging back and forth either to get a mouthful of their stored sweets or the jackets themselves.” Junius Henderson (1927) gives, in his table, the percentages of animal and vegetable food, exclusive of sap, taken by this sapsucker. Based on a study of 34 stomachs the total animal food made up 69 percent and the total vegetable food 31 percent of the whole; 42 percent consisted of ants and 12 percent of fruits, mostly wild; insects accounted for 11 percent and seeds for 5 percent. _Behavior._--Grinnell and Storer (1924) write: