STATE HOBTICULTUEAL SOCIETY. 1 35 



not use these words "thievery" and " guilt j" but I am talking, to-night, 

 the language of horticulture). 



My observations on this species reveal one novel and unexpected 

 fact regarding its food. While watching its operations in the blackberry 

 field I was struck by the shiftless and dispirited air of the bird, so different 

 from what its inspiring song would lead one to expect, and I thought, 

 "There is a bird which has something to be ashamed of." That it ate 

 blackberries was no sin, according to the code of the thrushes, and when 

 I found large amounts of corn in its stomach, this, although a surprising 

 thing for a thrush, did not strike me as especially significant until I 

 noticed that, the grains were always in quite small fragments, and almost 

 always associated with various species of scavenger-beetles. Then I saw, 

 what the appearance and odor of the contents of the stomach often con- 

 firmed, that this bird, like the flicker among woodpeckers, was by some 

 means being crowded away from the legitimate life of its family and had 

 fallen so low as to content itself with morsels picked from the excrements 

 of other animals. Even carrion-beetles were not too strong for its palate; 

 and in April these with their larvae formed eight per cent, of its food, 

 while the dung-beetles made four per cent., and fragments of grain (chiefly 

 corn; twenty-four percent. Thirty-six per cent, of its food was therefore 

 obtained from these disgusting sources; and yet how silver-clear, how 

 bugle-like in its varied and enlivening cadence is the morning song it 

 pipes from the tallest tree-top by the road side ! Perhaps we should 

 respect the philosophy of the bird which enables it to carry so light a heart 

 and cherish so successfully its gift of song in the midst of a life loaded 

 with the most sordid care; or admire the subtle alchemy of an organism 

 which can transmute these base materials into the pure gold of delightful 

 music. 



Twenty-eight specimens of this species were examined — eight in 

 April, four in May, nine in June and seven in July. 



In April, besides the elements mentioned, there appeared six per 

 cent, of ants, only four per cent, of caterpillars, four per cent, of carabidae, 

 five per cent, of curculios, eight per cent, of thousand-legs and fifteen per 

 cent, of Euryomia inda (a fruit-eating cetonian beetle, which comes out 

 again in the fall). Of hemiptera and oethoptera there were but trifling 

 traces, and none whatever of the crane-flies or the larvae of Bibio, which 

 formed so large a part of the early food of the robin and cat-bird. 



In May the food was of about the same character, the scavenger- 

 beetles rising, however, to fifteen per cent, of the whole and the carabidae 

 to nine per cent. 



In June a large part of the food, seventeen per cent., consisted of 

 ants. This large percentage is, perhaps, misleading, as it is chiefly due 

 to the fact that two of the birds taken had eaten an inordinate number 

 of them (sixty and seventy-five per cent), while the others had eaten but 

 very few. Nine per cent, of the food had been grasshoppers, and 

 one per cent. Buprestidae (boring-beetles), the only case in which I 

 have encountered this family of coleoptera in a thrush's stomach. 

 Caterpillars formed only one per cent, of the food in this month, but 



