1586 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 237 part 3 



nest, but the young birds did not open their eyes. The seven-day-old nestlings 

 in nest 3 were not being brooded. The adults were on the ground in the immediate 

 vicinity. The male, evidently disturbed, sang a short snatch of song. From 

 this night visit it seems that the young birds are brooded at night until they are 

 well feathered, or until about six or seven days old. 



Both DuBois (1923) and Mickey (1943) agree that the young are 

 fed insects from the very start and that the food is not regurgitated. 

 Both parents feed the young. "Moths and grasshoppers furnished 

 the bulk of the food," says Mickey. In addition to this menu Du- 

 Bois includes larval worms. On one occasion, he adds, "I thought I 

 recognized a spider as it went into one of the throats." He declares 

 the female gives as a food call "a brief twitter. The young, which 

 must be less than twenty-four hours old, have a note which can be 

 easily heard from the tent: it is a clear 'peep.' They frequently 

 give utterance to it while their mother is standing in the nest shading 

 them." As they grew, "the food call of the young longspurs," 

 Mickey notes, "changed from the continuous chippering of the nestling 

 to the shriller intermittent call of the fledgling." 



Mickey (1943) weighed and tabulated the young from 13 nests. 

 The minimum weight of nestling at hatching was 1.6 grains, the 

 maximum was 2.9 grams, while the average was 2.03 grams. Some- 

 times a nestling had to cope with the drawback of hatching out a day 

 later than its nest mates. "A nestling never overcame such a handi- 

 cap," states Mickey; "in fact, it often did not make normal daily 

 gains in either weight or length. * * * The chances of the survival 

 of these underlings were closely associated with the amount of food 

 that they received. In cases where the adults did not respond readily 

 to their weaker food calls, they died either before leaving the nest 

 (as in the nests 24 and 28), or shortly afterward (as the one from 

 nest 3, which was found dead six inches from the nest)." 



Sanitation of nests is maintained by both parents. "The nests 

 are kept quite clean until the last two days of nest life," reports 

 Mickey. "By this time the young so filled the nest cavity that 

 an occasional excrement sac was often overlooked. * * * Ants 

 were omnipresent. From the observation blind at nest 13, the female 

 was seen picking them from the young and out of the nest." Du- 

 Bois (1923) has these additional notes on sanitation: "The excrement 

 is sometimes swallowed and sometimes carried away, the two methods 

 in about equal proportions. * * * At this state of the development 

 of the young (age six days) the parents begin carrying the excrement 

 away from the nest, after one feeding the male being observed to 

 fly away with it, but at the next trip he swallowed it as formerly. * * * 

 The practice of swallowing excrement has been entirety discontinued. 



