“Although I’m a bird, I give you my word
That seldom you’ll know me to fly;
For I have a notion about locomotion,
The little Brown Creeper am I,
Dear little Brown Creeper am I.
“Beginning below, I search as I go
The trunk and the limbs of a tree,
For a fly or a slug, a beetle or bug;
They’re better than candy for me,
Far better than candy for me.
“When people are nigh I’m apt to be shy,
And say to myself, ‘I will hide,’
Continue my creeping, but carefully keeping
Away on the opposite side,
Well around on the opposite side.
“Yet sometimes I peek while I play hide-and-seek
If you’re nice I shall wish to see you;
I’ll make a faint sound and come quite around
And creep like a mouse in full view,
Very much like a mouse to your view.”
—Garrett Newkirk, in _Bird-Lore_.
“I guess I know what the other tree-trunk birds are, Gray Lady; they’re
Woodpeckers,” said little Bobby, who seemed to have grown taller and
broader ever since the day that Jacob had put a jack-knife in his hand
and taught him to carve a wooden spoon, and he felt himself to be a
full-fledged boy.
“Some Woodpeckers are pretty bad, though, ’cause grandpa caught a whole
bunch of ’em early last spring sucking the juice out of the apple trees
in the young orchard, and Uncle Bill, over the mountain, said they did
the same to his sugar-maples. I saw what they did, myself, and you can
see, too, if you stop up at our house some time when you are passing,
for the marks are there,—little round holes, all in rows so as they
make squares like the peppery holey plasters grandma wears for a lame
back. They were awfully pretty birds, too—all red on the head and neck,
and black and white speckled on top, and yellow underneath, and black
across the front. I had a good chance to see it, ’cause grandpop was
hoppin’ mad and tried to shoot them, and he did get one of the prettiest
of them all. Some of them that were on the apple tree didn’t have so
many colours in their feathers.”
“Perhaps those were females,” said Sarah Barnes.
“Yes, the paler ones are the females and lack the red throat and
sometimes the red head-feathers, also,” said Gray Lady, “for this bird
is called the Sapsucker, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, because it has, as
Bobby has told us, the bad habit of not only boring into trees for
insects, but sucking the sap as well, and when a number of them are
found together, of course, they are likely to do harm. Still, to my
mind, the very worst that they do is to give a bad name to the family of
the most industrious insect-eating birds that we have.
“Even though this Sapsucker takes enough sap to have earned his title,
he keeps up the family record as an insect eater, for he has a form of
the pointed tongue with hooked bristles on the end, like all
Woodpeckers, and this weapon acts both as a spear and trap to catch
insects. Then, too, the Sapsucker is not a permanent resident, like many
of his family, but nests early in the most northerly states and travels
about during a great part of the year. As he can only suck sap during
the growing season, and eats insects the year around, besides many wild
berries—such as those of poison ivy, dogwood, etc.—that are of no use
to us, I think he should be forgiven his sip of fresh spring sap, except
where, as in the case of Bobby’s grandfather, he is caught in the act of
hurting valuable trees.