AMERICAN PIPIT 29 



with the buff tints nearly lost below. The extent of the fading is sur- 

 prising. The new plumage is buff tinged, but wear during the breeding 

 season produces a black and white streaked bird, the buffs being wholly 

 lost through fading." Ridgway (1904) says of this first nuptial plum- 

 age : "The species breeds in this plumage, which is very different from 

 the fully adult sununer dress, * * * upper parts grayish, as in 

 summer adults, but superciliary stripe and under parts paler (dull pale 

 buffy or dull buffy white) than in winter adults, the chest, sides, and 

 flanks conspicuously streaked w^ith dusky." 



Adults have a complete postnuptial molt late in summer, mainly in 

 August, and a partial prenuptial molt, mainly in April, involving most 

 of the contour plumage. Fall birds in fresh plumage are browner 

 above and more buffy below, and spring birds are grayer above and 

 paler below, the spring female being less grayish above, more brownish, 

 and more heavily spotted below than the male ; but the two sexes are 

 very much alike in all plumages. 



Food. — Forbush's (1929) account of the food seems to cover the 

 subject quite satisfactorily, as follows: 



The food of the Pipit consists largely of insects, small molluscs and crustaceans, 

 small seeds and wild berries. More than 77 percent of its food has been found 

 to consist of insects, of which over 64 percent are injurious. The seeds are chiefly 

 weed seeds and waste grain. Professor Aughey found an average of 47 locusts 

 and 4 other insects in the stomachs of some Nebraska specimens. The Pipit takes 

 weeA'ils, bugs, grasshoppers, crickets, plant-lice and spiders. It renders valuable 

 service to the cotton growers of the South by destroying boll weevils. Exami- 

 nation of the stomachs of G8 birds taken in cotton fields showed that half of them 

 had eaten 120 boll weevils. Mr. A. H. Howell says that Pipits pick up weevils 

 throughout the winter, and in the spring they follow the plowman and capture 

 both weevils and grubs. During an outbreak of grain aphids, these destructive 

 insects constituted more than 70 per cent of the food of a Pipit. Mr. McAtee 

 estimated that a flock of these birds then present must have destroyed at least 

 a million of these pests daily. 



According to Preble and McAtee ( 1923) , "this species is reported by 

 Hanna to feed during its stay on the [Pribilof ] islands in fall migra- 

 tion almost exclusively on maggots on the killing fields. However, the 

 contents of two stomachs, collected August 31, 1914, and September 20, 

 1916, contained no trace of such maggots. The food in these gizzards 

 consisted of 10 per cent vegetable matter (seeds of a violet, Yiola langs- 

 dorfii) and 90 percent animal matter. The components of the animal 

 food were beetles (ground beetles, Pterostichus sp. ; and weevils, 

 Lophalo'phus inqumatus) , 37 per cent ; caterpillars, 33.5 per cent; plant 

 bugs {Irbisia sericarts), 8 per cent; spiders, 7.5 per cent; flies, 2.6 per 

 cent; and Hymenoptera, 1.5 per cent." 



Dr. George F. Knowlton writes to me : "On October 5, 1942, W. E. 

 Peay and I encountered a large flock of the American pipit, extending 

 from the Petersboro foothills in Cache Valley to Collinston, Utah. 



