66 THE SECOND BOOK OF BIRDS 
only one sort of food are called “ single-food ” 
animals, and they are growing scarcer every day. 
They need a change of diet to flourish. We 
should be sorry to have cedar-birds become 
scarce. 
Cedar-birds are fond of cherries, —as I said, 
— but they eat hundreds of cankerworms to one 
cherry. So they earn all they have. Besides, if 
they can get wild cherries, they prefer them. 
They have been proved to be among our most 
useful birds. In one hundred and fifty-two 
stomachs that were examined, only nine had cul- 
tivated cherries. 
Cedar-birds eat caterpillars and grubs, and are 
very fond of the elm-leaf beetle. They have 
been known to clear the elm-trees of a whole 
town, where the trees had been stripped for sev- 
eral years before they came. Besides insects, 
they eat the berries of many wild bushes and 
trees, such as wild cherry, dogwood, June-berry, 
elder, and others. They always prefer wild to 
cultivated berries. 
One spring I saw a little flock of cedar-birds 
in an orchard full of blossoming apple-trees. 
They spent nearly all their time going over 
the trees, and working among the blossoms. 
One who was careless about it might have 
thought they were destroying apple buds, for they 
