BIRD BIOGRAPHIES 



about the catbird are made: "Half of its food consists of 

 fruit, and the cultivated crops most often injured are cher- 

 ries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Bee- 

 tles, ants, crickets, and grasshoppers are the most impor- 

 tant element of its animal food. The bird is known to 

 attack a few pests such as cutworms, leaf beetles, clover- 

 root curculio, and the periodical cicada, but the good it 

 does in this way probably does not pay for the fruit it 

 steals. The extent to which it should be protected may 

 perhaps be left to the individual cultivator; that is, it 

 should be made lawful to destroy catbirds that are doing 

 manifest damage to crops." 



Dr. Judd found that catbirds fed their young almost en- 

 tirely on insects; he therefore scored a point in their favor. 

 Their bravery in defense of their nest and their young is 

 well known. 



Burroughs tells an unusual anecdote about a catbird as 

 follows : 



"A friend of mine who had a summer home on one of 

 the trout-streams of the Catskills discovered that the cat- 

 bird was fond of butter, and she soon had one of the birds 

 coming every day to the dining-room, perching on the back 

 of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter from a 

 fork held in the mistress's hand. I think the butter was 

 unsalted. My friend was convinced after three years that 

 the same pair of birds returned to her each year because 

 each season the male came promptly for his butter." ^ 



Many other incidents might be related concerning this 

 interesting bird, — of its unusual intelligence and its re- 

 markable power of mimicry. One catbird in Tennessee 

 learned to imitate the songs of all the birds that nested 



1 From "Under the Maples" by John Burroughs — page 66. 



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