THE BIRDS’ BAR-PARLOUR

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 602, 2 March 1929, Page 18

THE BIRDS’ BAR-PARLOUR

■ AR BIRD is the name that can he given appropriately to some of the feathered gentry, who purvey the “real stuff.” Strange to say, nothing whatever is joeing done about this “sly grog” trade. However, this oversight may he excused, for scarcely anyone knows that these bird barkeepers are in business. Who are they? No other than those strange members of the woodpecker race known as sapsuckers. “Sapsucker bars,” W. L. McAt.ee writes in “Nature Magazine,” “are most often opened on maple, birch, apple, and other trees yielding sweet sap, which forms the stock-in-trade. No bartender was every more particular about orderly arrangement of his spotless glasses than are the sapsuckers in ranging their drinking receptacles of sap cups n regular rows around the trunks and branches. These sap pits are drilled straight through corky outer and tender inner bark and sometimes slightly in the firmer sapwood. They slope downward as they run in and are well shaped for holding sap. “So that the supply of drink may always be plentiful, the sapsucker usually makes a few new holes each day, or freshens some of the old ones by enlarging them. When he has several girdles of pits on each of a number of

trees conveniently grouped, he can settle down to a happy life. He makes the rounds of his cups with great regularity and persistency, and lias been seen to linger over a speci-ally-liked sap for hours, even all day long.

“The sap of some particular kind of trees, and that of almost any of the sugary favourites when fermented, seems intoxicating, for the sapsuckers apparently become stupefied after tippling it too long. This is not good form for bar-tenders, but in another way the sapsuckers thoroughly deserve the name.

“Their bars attract the thirsty in numbers and variety. Other woodpeckers, especially the downy, are wont to slip in now and then for a drink, and the aristocratic oriole, named for Lord Baltimore, lends class to the patronage of the sapsuckers’ bars.

“The sapsucker bars are attended also by a host of insects, as ants, bees, wasps, flies, moths and butterflies. When the sap is flowing freely, a bird bar is very busy, with squirrels and warblers casually dropping in, with hummers buzzing about on the swiftest wings', and with insects fairly swarming, and all are spongers. However, the birds do not provide enticing drink entirely without compensation. The bird bartender eats such customers as ants and other bugs.”