EASTERN FOX SPARROW 1405 



Half the food consists of ragweed and Polygonmn." The birds do 

 little if any damage to cultivated fruits, for most of the fruit seeds 

 found, of blueberries, elderberries, blackberries, grapes, came from 

 birds collected in March, April, and May, and were obviously from 

 withered fruits of the previous year the birds picked up from the 

 ground. 



Many observers list the seeds of smartweed and other Polygonums, 

 ragweed and other noxious weeds as a particular source of winter 

 food. Judd found that they habi tally cracked open the larger seeds 

 before swallowing the kernels, thus destroying any possibility of future 

 germination. When scratching for fallen seeds in the spring the birds 

 naturally turn up numerous ground beetles (Carabidae) and the small, 

 many-legged millipeds of the Julus group. Judd lists these two 

 invertebrates as the most important animal food eaten in April, 

 when they total about 30 percent of the food of migrants. The 

 stomachs of two birds taken at Ottawa Apr. 24, 1908 (C. W. G. 

 Eifrig, 1910) contained a preponderance of insects, mostly beetles, 

 also remains of spiders and millipeds and some seeds of gromwell 

 (Lithospermum) . October birds George E. Atkinson (1894) shot in 

 witch hazel thickets at Toronto had eaten witch hazel buds, beetles, 

 firefly (Lampyridae) and cranefly (Tipulidae) larvae, spiders, millipeds, 

 and seeds of hound's tongue {Cynoglossum) ; many had also ingested 

 particles of sand, gravel, and slate. W. B. Barrows (1912) records a 

 fox sparrow in Wisconsin that had eaten 50 chinch bugs (Lygaeidae) . 



Very little information is available on the food of the eastern fox 

 sparrows in their summer haunts, but it is thought to be mostly 

 insects. Certainly the young are fed almost entirely on animal food. 

 J. J. Audubon (1841) says that in Newfoundland and southern Labra- 

 dor "I have frequently seen them searching along the shores for 

 minute shellfish on which they feed abundantly." Ludlow Griscom 

 (1926) observed a different type of beachcombing on the west coast of 

 Newfoundland: "Along the Straits of Belle Isle family parties hunt 

 along the beach, and occasionally nibble the dead and drying fish that 

 strew the ground around the villages." 



Voice. — The music of the fox sparrow inspired William Brewster 

 (1883) to write one of the first and best appreciations of it: 



What the Mockingbird is to the South, the Meadow Lark to the plains 

 of the West, the Robin and Song Sparrow to Massachusetts, and the White- 

 throated Sparrow to northern New England, the Fox Sparrow is to the bleak 

 regions bordering the Gulf of St. Lawrence. At all hours of the day, in every 

 kind of weather late into the brief summer, its voice rises among the evergreen 

 woods filling the air with quivering, delicious melody, which at length dies softly, 

 mingling with the soughing of the wind in the spruces, or drowned by the muffled 

 roar of the surf beating against neighboring cliffs. To my ear the prominent 

 characteristic of its voice is richness. It expresses careless joy and exultant 



