In Tecolote Canyon, west of Santa Barbara, there is a giant sycamore which I count one of the handsomest examples of Carpintero’s workmanship--an unbroken shaft, at least forty feet high and three feet across the inlaid face, covered with a “solid” mass of acorns totalling, say, some 20,000. Strawberry Valley in the San Jacinto Mountains appears to be a paradise for the California Woodpecker. Here majestic oaks (_Quercus californica_) alternate with still more majestic pines (_Pinus ponderosa_), the former for sustenance and the latter for storage, and the doughty “California” is probably the most abundant bird in the valley. The boles of the most enormous pines are methodically riddled with their acorn-carrying niches, and in some of the trees the work is carried through from base to crown. In one such tree I estimated that there were imbedded no less than 50,000 acorns. Dr. William E. Ritter has made an intensive study of this interesting habit of the California woodpecker and has published the results of his observations and theories in three extensive papers (1921, 1922, 1938). There is much food for thought in these scholarly papers, to which the reader is referred, but space here will permit only brief quotations from or references to them. As to whether the hole drilling is injurious to the trees, he says (1921): “Although I have examined many storage pines in widely separated localities, I have never seen anything even suggestive of harm to the trees from the holes. Never, so far as I have noticed, do the holes pierce through into the deeper living layers of the bark.” He noticed that “almost without exception the nuts were inserted tip in and base out, most of them fitting the hole snugly,” having been driven in good and hard, and flush with the surface of the bark, or even countersunken below it; and that “to a certain extent the store holes are made to fit the size of the acorns they are to receive”; this latter point was discovered when he noted that, in a region where the black oak (_Quercus kelloggii_) predominated, the holes were considerably larger than they were in the live-oak region, the acorns of the black oak being sharply larger than those of the live oak. In some cases the acorns were not driven in flush with the bark, the base being left protruding somewhat and thus leaving them vulnerable to pilfering by rodents and perhaps some birds; in this connection, he says: “Conclusive evidence that nut-eating rodents (squirrels, rats) prey upon the acorns stored by the woodpeckers was first obtained on the present visit. Two trees were found on which the bark immediately around acorn holes had been gnawed by rodents, as unmistakably proved by the tooth marks. The acorns were gone from some of these holes, but not from all, thus showing that the marauders had failed in some of their efforts.”