1906.] BIRDS ABOUT OUR FARM HOMES. 189 



says of a palm warbler that he watched, that it must have 

 killed nine thousand five hundred insects in about four hours. 

 These may be extreme cases, but even if we halve the numbers 

 given, they will still show the bird's possibilities for good. 



The remarkable appetites of the young birds keep their 

 parents very busy. The old birds usually carry to the young 

 from one to twelve insects at each visit to the nest, although 

 some visits are made for other purposes. A pair of vireos 

 visited the nest one hundred and twenty-five times in ten 

 hours. A pair of chippies made nearly two hundred visits to 

 their young in a day. Two martins have been seen to visit 

 their young three hundred and twelve times in fourteen hours. 

 A pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks made four hundred and 

 thirty-six calls at the nest in eleven hours. House wrens have 

 been seen to enter their nest from thirty to seventy-one times 

 an hour. 



If we turn for a moment to the records of the amount of 

 food found in birds' stomachs by dissection, we can see at once 

 why they are such effective checks on the increase of insects. 

 A large part of the alimentary canal is often packed with food. 

 The stomach of a bird is not seldom found to contain, as Pro- 

 fessor Beal remarks, enough food to form a pile " two or three 

 times as large as the original stomach with food all in it." 

 Where birds have no crop or special enlargement of the gullet, 

 to contain an extra supply of food, the whole gullet is used for 

 this purpose, and when favorite food is abundant the bird will 

 fill itself to the throat. The amount of food found in the stom- 

 achs of birds, as given by the investigators connected with the 

 United States Biological Survey, seems large, but anyone can 

 verify the statements made by examining the stomachs for 

 himself, for they are all preserved and kept for reference. 

 Professor Beal found in the stomach of a yellow-billed cuckoo 

 two hundred and seventeen fall web worms, and in another 

 two hundred and fifty American tent caterpillars. Two flickers 

 were found to have eaten respectively three thousand and five 

 thousand ants. Sixty grasshoppers were found in one night- 

 hawk's stomach, and Professor Harvey has found five hundred 

 mosquitoes in another. Seven thousand five hundred seeds of 

 wood sorrel had been eaten by a mourning dove, six thousand 

 four hundred by another, and nine thousand two hundred, 

 chiefly of weeds, were found in a third. Dr. Judd says that the 



