He sounded his harsh call several times. Seemingly in answer to his call the female appeared. This was the first we had seen of the female. The female examined the nest hole, flew up on a branch and uttered a series of low notes. The male joined her, alighting a foot away and uttering a series of low chuckling notes. While giving these notes he strutted along the limb with wing-tips and tail jerking rapidly. As he approached his mate she crouched low on the limb and the mating act was accomplished. The act lasted several seconds before the birds separated to perch side by side on a limb. After a minute or so the female flew off through the woods and the male went into the nest hole. In about five minutes the female came to the nest hole and again uttered her soft coaxing notes. The male came out of the hole and both birds flew to a limb where again the mating act was consummated. The male returned to the nest. In our two-hour watch the female only went to the nest hole to call the mate out. _Nesting._--Dr. Grinnell (1908) says of its nesting in the San Bernardino Mountains: Tamarack pines were selected as nest trees, usually old ones with the core dead and rotten but with a live shell on the outside. In one found June 22, 1905, there were four holes drilled one above the other about eighteen inches apart, and one of these holes contained three small young and two infertile eggs. * * * Later on in the same day another nest was found similarly located containing four half-fledged young. A nest with half-grown young was found in the same locality, June 14, 1906; and on June 26 of the same year a nest twenty feet up in a half-dead tamarack held five two-thirds-grown young and one rotten egg. So that a full set of eggs probably varies from four to six in number. On June 18, 1907, a nest with small young was located ten feet up in an exceptionally large nearly dead tamarack pine. This was one of the lowest of a series of forty-seven well-formed holes of similar external appearance, which penetrated this one tree trunk on all sides up to an estimated height of thirty-five feet. W. L. Dawson (1923) writes: “One soon comes to recognize the rigid requirements of the Williamson Sapsucker in the matter of nesting sites. Given a pine which is beginning to die at the top, usually in a fairly sheltered situation, and a pair of birds will adopt it for a permanent home. They will occupy it from year to year, or perhaps the year around, nesting twice in a season; and a long occupation is evinced by a trunk riddled with holes at all levels. One such ‘family tree,’ closely examined, had 38 holes, apparently complete and fit for habitation or incubation. At the time of our visit, on June 19th, the male was industriously drilling a new excavation at a height of 45 feet.”