Besides drinking the sap from the holes, this bird extracts a quantity of the tender inner bark of the tree, and when a tree has been encircled for several feet up and down its trunk by these numerous little sap wells, the effect becomes apparent in the lessened circulation of the liquid blood of the tree; and before long, death is certain to ensue. So the work of the sapsucker is injurious, while the grub-seeking woodpeckers confer only good upon the trees they frequent. And how pitiful is the downfall of a doomed tree! Hardly has its vitality been lessened an appreciable amount, when somehow the word is passed to the insect hordes who hover about in waiting, as wolves hang upon the outskirts of a herd of buffalo. In the spring, when the topmost branches have received a little less than their wonted amount of wholesome sap and the leaves are less vigorous, the caterpillars and twig-girdlers attack at once. Ichneumen flies and boring beetles seem to know by signs invisible to us that here is opportunity. Then in the fall come again the sapsuckers to the tree, remorselessly driving hole after hole through the still untouched segments of its circle of life. When the last sap-channel is pierced and no more can pass to the roots, the tree stands helpless, waiting for the end. Swiftly come frost and rain, and when the April suns again quicken all the surrounding vegetation into vigorous life, the victim of the sapsuckers stands lifeless, its branches reaching hopelessly upward, a naked mockery amid the warm green foliage around. Insects and fungi and lightning now set to work unhindered, and the tree falls at last,--dust to dust--ashes to ashes. A sapsucker has been seen in early morning to sink forty or fifty wells into the bark of a mountain ash tree, and then to spend the rest of the day in sidling from one to another, taking a sip here and a drink there, gradually becoming more and more lethargic and drowsy, as if the sap actually produced some narcotic or intoxicating effect. Strong indeed is the contrast between such a picture and the same bird in the early spring,--then full of life and vigour, drawing musical reverberations from some resonant hollow limb. Like other idlers, the sapsucker in its deeds of gluttony and harm brings, if anything, more injury to others than to itself. The farmers well know its depredations and detest it accordingly, but unfortunately they are not ornithologists, and a peckerwood is a peckerwood to them; and so while the poor downy, the red-head, and the hairy woodpeckers are seen busily at work cutting the life threads of the injurious borer larvae, the farmer, thinking of his dying trees, slays them all without mercy or distinction. The sapsucker is never as confiding as the downy, and from a safe distance sees others murdered for sins which are his alone.