Then a peculiar thing happened, so unexpected that it was startling. He had just rounded a bend in the trail. Ten yards ahead of him stood a thick hevea tree scarred by the cuts he had made. A flickering movement caught his eye; it was near the folded cup that served to catch the sap. Stopping in his tracks he looked intently at the little container, but saw nothing. He stood a full minute without removing his gaze from the spot, and just as he began to think that the flickering object had been a falling leaf his persistence was rewarded. A long, curved beak, followed by a brown head and two bright eyes, appeared cautiously around the tree trunk. David did not move. After a moment’s pause a brown bird about eight inches long hopped into view; it looked like a woodpecker, clinging to the bark with its feet and using its tail as a prop to sit on when it stopped to rest. David recognized it as a woodhewer, of which there were many species in the forest. The bird now hopped along fearlessly and for the first time the man noticed that it held something in its beak. It made straight for the cup and dropped the object it had been carrying into it. Immediately after, it flew away; a few undulating dashes through the air and it had alighted on the base of a neighboring tree and at once began to hop nimbly up the straight trunk. Soon it disappeared into a hole high overhead, which was apparently the entrance to its nesting cavity. In a moment it came out again and, clinging to the bark, hammered vigorously some object it had brought out of the cavity; then it flew to the nearest hevea and dropped the morsel into the little pool of sap forming in the leaf-cup. David watched the bird make several more trips between its nest and the nearby rubber trees. The mystery was solved. It was catching the ants that invaded its domicile, pounding off their heads against the rough bark and then disposing of the remains by dropping them into the nearest pool of liquid it could find, possibly to make doubly sure that they would not again come to life to disturb it. If the nearest pool happened to be a cup of latex the bird, of course, used it and David suffered thereby. The woodhewers were plentiful in the forest, which accounted for the fact that so many trees had been visited by them. He wondered why the men had not told him about this. David said nothing about his discovery when he reached camp. But that afternoon, when he had finished his work in the smokehouse, he took a long walk in the forest, visiting the routes of several of the men. He found, as he had confidently expected, that the proportion of their trees visited by the birds was as great as on his own line; but the men had made up for the loss by extending their lines and bringing new trees into bearing as fast as others had to be discarded.