Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/609

Rh holes in the bark of their favorite trees and in sipping from the sap fountains thus opened the life blood of the doomed trees. They do not range about through the forest tapping one tree here and another there, but they select one, two, perhaps three groups of trees well lighted and warmed by the sun, and make sap orchards of them, clinging to them many hours at a time, week after week, and returning to them, or others close at hand, year after year. Within a mile of my cottage at the foot of Chocorua there are half a dozen of these drinking places of the yellow-breasted woodpeckers, and each one of them is a focus for rubythroats. The one which I have known longest I discovered in 1887. It consists of a group of gray birches, springing from a single stump and expanding into fifteen distinct trunks. When I first saw it all the trees were living, and nearly all of them were yielding sap from the girdles of small drills which the woodpeckers had made in the trunks, about nine feet from the ground. In July, 1893, all but three of the trees were dead, and of the dead trunks all except two had been broken off by the wind at a point a few inches below the drills. The surviving trees had been tapped, and were in use by both sapsuckers and humming birds. During 1890, 1891, and 1892 the humming bird in attendance at this orchard was a male of noticeably strong character. There was no mistaking him for any chance visitor at the place. He spent all his time there, and repelled intruders with great vigor, flying violently at them, squeaking, humming as noisily as a swarm of bees, and returning to his favorite perch as soon as they had been put to flight. He often attacked the sapsuckers themselves, buzzed in their faces, and seemed little abashed when they turned upon him, as they sometimes did, and drove him from their midst. He also had a habit of squeaking spitefully when he was drinking from the sap wells, especially on his return from a bout with some other humming bird. Searching for him in July, 1893, I failed to find him, but discovered that in his place a pair of birds seemed to have established themselves. Of course, it is possible that my friend of > previous years may have taken to himself a wife and have become mild-mannered in consequence, but I find it impossible to believe in this theory, so pronounced were the old male's temper and peculiar ways. The new male, for example, did not use the same twigs for perches, and he did not keep his head wagging from side to side as the old one did with a vigor and regularity which nothing but a pendulum ever equaled.

The new male, however, showed me a performance far more interesting in character than any of his petulant predecessor's, and one which establishes the Chocorua rubythroat as a musician and a dancer. One day, while this male was drinking at the sap fountains, a female arrived. The male greeted her with squeaks and