EASTERN OVENBIRD 465 



Food. — No compreliensive study has thus far been made of the food 

 of the ovenbird. Unlike most of the warblers, this bird is terrestrial 

 in its habits ; instead of gleaning its food from the trunks, limbs, and 

 leaves of trees, it rustles about on the ground turning over leaves to 

 scan the leaf mold of the forest floor, where it finds snails, slugs, 

 myriapods, and earthworms as well as the weevils, beetles, aphids, 

 crickets, ants, and spiders which comprise a large proportion of its 

 food. It is also known to feed on moths and caterpillars and more 

 rarely it may catch flying insects on the wing. It takes a few seeds 

 and small wild fruits but these represent only a little more than one- 

 fiftieth of its entire food. In Florida, ovenbirds have been reported 

 as feeding on the red mulberry. In certain sections of its range it 

 feeds freely on grasshoppers and locusts. Junius Henderson (1934) 

 quotes Aughey as finding an average of 18 locusts in each of 6 stomachs 

 of the ovenbird collected in Nebraska. He adds there was an average 

 of 15 kinds of other insects present in each of the stomachs. 



Sylvester D. Judd (1900) examined the stomachs of 3 half-grown 

 ovenbird nestlings which contained "beetles of the family Lampyridae 

 and click beetles, caterpillars, moths, spiders and snails." 



In w^atching birds at the nest from a blind, practically all of the food 

 I saw fed to the young during the first 3 days consisted of various 

 small green and brown larvae. After that time I saw the adults bring 

 spiders, snails, earthworms, centipedes, and a number of winged 

 insects such as flies, moths, beetles, and ants to feed to their young. 



Miss Cordelia Stanwoocl saw young ovenbirds feeding on mos- 

 quitoes at Ellsworth, Maine. In her notes she writes : "As I started 

 for home, the female crossed my path, and a young bird followed. As 

 I neared the youngster, he stopped to snap up a mosquito. I knelt 

 slowly and held a mosquito, on the tip of my finger to the little fellow. 

 After hesitating once or twice, he snapped it up. Then I put my hand 

 flat on the ground and let the mosquitoes bite. He walked over to 

 my hand, snapping up mosquitoes for a long time. At last he followed 

 a mosquito across the path, and in answer to the chirps of the parent 

 birds wandered in their direction." Miss Stanwood has also observed 

 the young catching black flies. 



Dr. Alexander Wetmore (1916) reports on the examinations of the 

 contents of 13 stomachs of ovenbirds collected in Puerto Rico during 

 the months from December to April, inclusive. The animal food of 

 these birds amounted to 62.43 percent and the vegetable material 37.57 

 percent. He presents further details as follows : 



In all of these stomachs were considerable quantities of gravel, and all animal 

 matter was ground very fine. Weevil remains (4.8 percent) were present in four 

 stomachs taken in April. Other beetle remains (9.63 percent) in eight stomachs 

 were so finely ground that they could not be determined. Ants were eaten by 

 eight birds and form the large amount of 8.5 percent. Other Hymenoptera 



