Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/362

346 This species is decidedly uncommon in this latitude, and one may watch patiently for years without so much as getting a glimpse of one, and when at last they do make their appearance it is not by the hundred, as is apt to be the way with northern birds when they see fit to visit us, but scattered singly about the woods and swamps in a manner hardly calculated to attract attention. This is about their southern limit though curiously enough a species almost identical with this one inhabits the forests of Guiana, while the intermediate region can show nothing in the least like it.

The coloring of the yellow-bellied woodpecker is somewhat more complicated, the white being partly replaced by yellow, and the throat and top of the head crimson. Autumn birds are frequently seen without any red whatever, and with the entire plumage so thickly streaked and spotted as to give an effect of dull grayish brown in the distance. They make their appearance with considerable regularity in the spring, about the middle of April or a little before, singly or in pairs, and seldom in any great numbers. They are decidedly rare throughout the summer, and are seldom very abundant in the fall except in certain seasons, when they outnumber all the other woodpeckers put together, and may be seen in families of half a dozen or more, running about the hickory and oak trees, which appear to be their favorites. Being much more restless and impatient than the downy, they seldom linger long in a place, but keep flying from tree to tree, pecking here and there as suits their fancy, until, finding an especially attractive spot or decayed branch, they settle down for a few moments of hard work, and manage to do considerable execution in a comparatively short time. They are commonly called sapsuckers, and are supposed to injure fruit trees by drilling little cup-shaped holes in the bark in order to drink sap which flows from them. There is no doubt that they make the holes, sometimes thousands of them in a