16 USEFUL BIRDS. 
the promising days of early spring before the leaves appear on the 
trees. 
The Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Ringlets, tiny denizens 
of woodlands, consume large quantities of beetles, bugs, tree hop- 
pers, scale insects, plant lice, and leaf hoppers. 
It is unfortunate that the Mourning Dove or Ground Dove is 
included amongst our game birds, as it deserves protection. A 
bulletin from the United States Department of Agriculture (Farm- 
ers’ Bulletin 513, Bureau of Biological Survey) reports the finding 
in one stomach of seventy-five hundred seeds of yellow wood sorrel ; 
in another sixty-four hundred seeds of foxtail, and in a third twenty- 
six hundred seeds of slender pospalum, forty-eight hundred and 
twenty seeds of orange hawkweed, nine hundred fifty of hairy 
vervain, one hundred twenty of Carolina cranesbill, fifty of yellow 
wood sorrel, six hundred twenty of panic grass, and forty miscel- 
laneous weed seeds. 
Amongst our game birds, the Quail gets most of its grain after 
the crop has been gathered: it eats insects, some of them very in- 
jurious; large numbers of potato beetles and chinch bugs have 
been found in its crop; army worms, cut worms and wire worms 
form a portion of its diet. It appears to be growing more abundant 
in the State from year to year, and working farther north each 
season, yet its occurrence in any latitude in any year naturally 
depends upon the severity of the preceding winter and upon gen- 
eral climatic conditions. 
The Killdeer or Ringneck Plover, common in low-lying fields 
and frequently seen about the barnyard, easily recognized not only 
by its rather plaintive note but particularly by the black band across 
the white breast, consumes the larvae of many injurious insects 
found in pastures and meadows; it eats wire-worms, caterpillars, 
grasshoppers and crickets and the eggs of the two latter. 
The Black Tern, found so abundantly about our prairie sloughs, 
and the most abundant representative of the group in Minnesota, 
is a good friend of the farmer, for when the sloughs are dry, and 
even before, they consume large numbers of grasshoppers. Amongst 
others of this family (gulls), Franklin’s Rosy Gull is one of the 
chief breeders within the State’s borders and is a voracious eater 
of grasshoppers. 
