Since PROLOG programs are regarded not only as declarative predicates but also as procedural programs, it is reasonable that we first write a clear declarative PROLOG program and then transform it into a possibly unclear but efficient procedural program. In this paper we present a PROLOG program transformation method especially for a binary-tree manipulation program. By using a list as intermediate representation, we can derive a procedural tree manipulation program from a declarative one. In addition we find some heuristic knowledge for writing a tree manipulation algorithm from processes of PROLOG program transformation. These processes may be useful for automatic programming.