This love of home, of birthplace, bridges over a thousand physical differences between these feathered creatures and ourselves. We forget their expressionless masks of horn, their feathered fingers, their scaly toes, and looking deep into their clear, bright eyes, we know and feel a kinship, a sympathy of spirit, which binds us all together, and we are glad.
|
Yet these sweet sounds of the early season,
And these fair sights of its sunny days,
Are only sweet when we fondly listen,
And only fair when we fondly gaze. There is no glory in star or blossom Till looked upon by a loving eye; There is no fragrance in April breezes Till breathed with joy as they wander by. William Cullen Bryant. |
THE SIMPLE ART OF SAPSUCKING
The yellow-bellied sapsucker is, at this time of year, one of our most abundant woodpeckers, and in its life we have an excellent example of that individuality which is ever cropping out in Nature—the trial and acceptance of life under new conditions.
In the spring we tap the sugar maples, and gather great pailfuls of the sap as it rises from its winter resting-place in the roots, and the sapsucker likes to steal from our pails or to tap the trees for himself. But throughout part of the year he is satisfied with an insect diet and chooses the time when the sap begins to flow downward in the autumn for committing his most serious depredations upon the tree. It was formerly thought that this bird, like its near relatives, the downy and hairy woodpeckers, was forever boring for insects; but when we examine the regularity and symmetry of the arrangement of its holes, we realise that they are for a very different purpose than the exposing of an occasional grub.
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.