318 



half as many were found in waste' weedy fields as in pastures; 

 and that the remainder were about equally divided between 

 barn-yards and orchards. Some 52 per cent, of this species — 

 those in corn fields, stubble, and waste lands — were among 

 weeds, and 40 per cent, of them were following farm stock in 

 pastures and yards. Those in orchards (6 per cent.) were doubt- 

 less there mainly for shelter and rest. The table of numbers 

 per square mile (Table VI.) shows that orchards were the favor- 

 ite resort of the sparrows. Barn-yards, pastures, and corn 

 fields were their principal feeding grounds, and only scat- 

 tering numbers occurred in stubble, meadows, and plowed fields. 

 Not a single one of the 1620 sparrows noted on this trip was 

 seen in the 59 fields of young wheat. These sparrows were, in 

 a word, barn-yard, corn-field, and pasture birds, and were doubt- 

 less feeding mainly on weed seeds aud undigested fragments' 

 of grain. 



Cruic-bJackhinh and (^roirs. — Blacklnrds, on the other hand, 

 were seen to be at this time essentially birds of the pasture, 90 

 per cent, of them occurring there, and only 4 per cent, in corn 

 fields, 4 per cent, in stubble, and 2 percent, in farmyards. Prac- 

 tically the same may be said of the crows, whose ratios of 

 abundance are close copies of the preceding excepting for the 

 6 per cent, on plowed ground, the 1 per cent, in meadows, and 

 the absence of crows from barn-yards. During this whole trip 

 of 192 miles, only 12 crows aud 21 blackbirds wei'e seen in the 

 1300 acres of corn covered by these observations — an average 

 of 6 crows and 10 blackbirds per square mile of corn. It was 

 suggestive of a useful feature of the habits of crows that an 

 average of 79 of these birds per square mile were seen on plowed 

 ground, where they could have found little if any food except, 

 insect larviv — mainly white-grubs. The record for blackbirds 

 is disturbed by the fact that they were moving southward 

 when the trip began, as is shown by their occurrence at the 

 rate of 7.2 per mile of travel during the first half of the period 

 of this trip aud at only 1.1 per mile during the last half. 



Meddoic-larks. — That good genius of the farm, the meadow- 

 lark, was evidently at home almost everywhere on the farm 



