12 Wild Bird Guests 



to get in sufficient numbers to maintain life. 

 Every now and then there comes a spring so 

 cold and stormy that bluebirds perish in great 

 numbers and a great scarcity of these birds is 

 observed the following year. More rarely the 

 destruction is so widespread that several years 

 pass before bluebirds are seen again in their 

 usual numbers. In The Auk for October, 1907, 

 Dr. Thomas S. Roberts of the Minnesota 

 Natural History Survey, tells of a snowstorm 

 which occurred in Minnesota and Iowa, in 

 March, 1904, when not far from a million and a 

 half Lapland longspurs perished in a single night. 

 But the birds which suffer most frequently, and 

 as a rule most severely from these untimely 

 storms, are those which capture their insect prey 

 almost entirely on the wing — such birds as swifts 

 and swallows. The snow or cold rain having 

 swept the air practically clear of insect life, 

 such birds quickly starve to death. Purple 

 martins, perhaps because they are larger than 

 the other swallows and hence require more food, 

 often suffer very severely. For example, so 

 many purple martins were destroyed by storms 

 in the springs of 1903 and 1904 that there were 

 hardly any of these beautiful birds to be found 

 in Massachusetts and they were scarce all over 

 New England. 



