Danny Grim, age 9, of Exeter, Calif., for his question:

Does a woodpecker hurt trees?

The hammering rat tat tat rat tat tat echoes and re echoes through the woods The noisy drummer is Mr. Woodpecker, a gaily dressed bird with a red cap on the top of his busy busy head. There he is, clinging half way up a straight tree trunk. How hard and fast he workal Surely he will beat the poor tree to pieces or hammer out his own brains. No, the tree will not suffer nor will the woodpecker.

The tree, of course, does not feel pain as we do. The truth is, the woodpecker is helping the tree. He is looking for the bugs and grubs that live under the bark and burrow into the wood. These pesky insects often weaken and destroy the wood of the tree. The poor tree can do nothing against these enemies. The friendly woodpecker digs them out and eats them up.

The woodpecker is cousin to the pretty flickers and to the sapsuckers. Altogether, he has more than 200 cousins and only the sapsuckers do any real harm to the trees. This is sad, for the sapsucker is very fond of fruit trees and the farmer hates to hear his drum drumming in the orchard. Since he acts like a woodpecker and harms fruit trees, the farmer is apt to think that all woodpeckers should be treated as enemies,

The sapsucker earns his name from his activities in the spring while the fresh sap is flowing through the trees. Dressed in gay feathers and wearing a red or yellow vest, off he goes to the orchard. There he drills a row of holes in a tree trunk, then another and another. Soon the sap begins to ooze through the wounds and the sapsucker flies back to drink. The loss of sap may weaken the trees. The sapsucker is the black sheep of the woodpecker family.

Every woodpecker is a born carpenter. He does his hammering with a hard bill shaped like a chisel. He has powerful neck muscles to hammer his bill hard and fast. The furious hammering does not damage his brains for a very good reason. His head bones are extra hard and thick to soften the blows. As he pecks at the wood, from time to time he turns up a. grub or a bug. In a, flash, the insect is trapped on a long sticky tongue and swallowed whole.

You may wonder how the woodpecker clings to the straight side of a tree. To do this, he uses his tail and his special feet. As you watch, he may move up or down or around the trunk in little leaps. Each time he lands with his chest flat to the trunk. His feet are designed to cling securely to the bark. Each foot has four toes ending in strong, sharp claws. Two toes face forward and two face backward. Together they hook into the tree with a firm grasp. As he clings there, the woodpecker’s pretty tail is spread out in a fan of stiff feathers. It is pressed down to the trunk of the tree to give him extra support,