126 HOMING WITH THE BIRDS 



will pull out their feathers and nibble the ends of 

 them, so ravenous are they for the taste of meat. 



This criticism set me to watching the seed-eaters 

 afield particularly, and I soon learned that there 

 was not one of them that did not vary its diet with 

 fruit or a few berries and a bug or a worm here and 

 there. On one occasion I saw one black vulture 

 from a nest of which I was making a series of pic- 

 tures in the Limberlost, fly down into a fence corner 

 and eat a quantity of catnip leaves. A few days 

 later I saw its mate snipping grass. Every one has 

 seen dogs eat grass, and every cat lover knows what 

 a treat catnip is to a cat. Both vultures ate freely 

 of a handful of red raspberries I once placed in 

 the mouth of their log; while every summer the 

 kingfishers that fish around my stretch of lake 

 shore in front of the Cabin, north, come into the 

 wild cherry trees and eat fruit. 



I once dug open the nest of a kingfisher in an 

 embankment, after the young had left it, in order 

 to measure the circumference of the nest room and 

 the length of the tunnel, and to examine carefully 

 the structure of the nest. It seemed to be formed 

 entirely of regurgitated pellets that the brooding 

 bird had ejected in a circle around her during in- 

 cubation. Microscopic examination proved that 

 nine tenths of the nest wall were the bones and 

 scales of small fish; the other tenth was about 

 equally divided between berry seeds and the 

 bony structure of grasshoppers. 



