Sapsucker Feeder
by Patrick Coin
One winter, a male yellow-bellied sapsucker was a frequent visitor to my Durham, North Carolina, yard. It frequently visited a particular mockernut hickory (Carya tomentosa), drilling several sets of sap wells around the trunk. I longed to get photographs of the bird, but the tree was too far from the house for convenient photography. It was then that I hit on the idea of bringing the sapsucker to me.
Reasoning that the bird would be attracted to any reasonable facsimile of its own wells, I obtained a green branch, about eight feet long and six inches in diameter. In this I drilled a ring of about ten 1-1/4-inch-diameter holes, angled down toward the lower end of the branch and perhaps 1 inch deep. I leaned this up against the hickory tree, where I knew the sapsucker would soon visit. Using a turkey baster, I filled the wells with corn syrup. I then retreated to the house to observe.
The ruse worked immediately. The sapsucker came in to feed from his wells, but hopped onto my branch and began to sip from the artificial wells at once. Soon I had the bird coming in for this very sweet sap frequently--it even tried drilling more wells on this incredibly rich food source.
Over the next two days or so, I moved the branch in several steps toward the house, mounting it in a new posthole each time. The sapsucker was unfazed, and soon posed for the camera a mere six feet from my kitchen window. He seemed completely uninterested in the snapping shutter of my camera at close range. Using a 400-mm lens equipped with an extension tube, I was able to obtain frame-filling shots of the bird. Yellow-rumped warblers, downy woodpeckers, and ruby-crowned kinglets were attracted to the wells also. But gray squirrels proved to be a problem. They gnawed out the carefully drilled holes in order to get at the syrup. I can only hope that they developed a severe case of tooth decay for their trouble!
Some technical hints, should you chose to try this: The thick corn syrup proved the most satisfactory bait, because it did not run out of the wells so readily. Cheap pancake syrup made with real sugar was also attractive to the sapsuckers, but it was runny. Choice of wood proved tricky. My best results were obtained with green branches of elm, discarded after pruning. Older wood absorbed the syrup too readily, leaving none for the sapsucker. The thick, furrowed bark of elm obscured the too-round look of the wells in photographs and proved an easy perch for several species of birds.
Patrick Coin is field trip coordinator for New Hope Audubon Society. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
