CATBIRD (Dumetella carolinensis) 
Length, about 9 inches. The slaty gray 
plumage and black cap and tail are distinctive. 
Range: Breeds throughout the United States 
west to New Mexico, Utah, Oregon, and Wash- 
ington, and in southern Canada; winters from 
the Gulf States to Panama. 
Habits and economic status: In many locali- 
ties the catbird is one of the commonest birds. 
Tangled growths are its favorite nesting places 
and retreats, but berry patches and ornamental 
shrubbery are not disdained. Hence the bird 
is a familiar dooryard visitor. The bird has a 
fine song, unfortunately marred by occasional 
cat calls. With habits similar to those of the 
mocking bird and a song almost as varied, the 
catbird has never secured a similar place in 
popular favor. Half of its food consists of 
fruit, and the cultivated crops most often in- 
jured are cherries, strawberries, raspberries, 
and blackberries. Beetles, ants, crickets, and 
grasshoppers are the most important element 
of its animal food. The bird is known to 
attack a few pests, as cutworms, leaf beetles, 
clover-root curculio, and the periodical cicada; 
but the good it does in this way probably does 
not pay for the fruit it steals. The extent to 
which it should be protected may perhaps be 
left to the individual cultivator—that is, it 
should be made lawful to destroy catbirds that 
are doing manifest damage to crops. 
LOGGERHEAD SHRIKE (Lanius 
ludovicianus) 
Length, about 9 inches. A gray, black, and 
white bird, distinguished from the somewhat 
similarly colored mocking bird by the black 
stripe on side of head. 
Range: Breeds throughout the United States, 
Mexico, and southern Canada; winters in the 
southern half of the United States and in 
Mexico. 
Habits and economic status: The loggerhead 
shrike, or southern butcher bird, 1s common 
throughout its range and is sometimes called 
“French mocking bird” from a superficial re- 
semblance and not from its notes, which are 
harsh and unmusical. The shrike is naturally 
an insectivorous bird which has extended its 
bill of fare to include small mammals, birds, 
and reptiles. Its hooked beak is well adapted 
to tearing its prey, while to make amends for 
the lack of talons it has hit upon the plan of 
forcing its victim, if too large to swallow, into 
the fork of a bush or tree, where it can tear 
it asunder. Insects, especially grasshoppers, 
constitute the larger part of its food, though 
beetles, moths, caterpillars, ants, wasps, and a 
few spiders also are taken. While the butcher 
bird occasionally catches small birds, its prin- 
cipal vertebrate food is small mammals, as 
field mice, shrews, and moles, and when possi- 
ble it obtains lizards. It habitually impales its 
surplus prey on a thorn, sharp twig, or barb 
of a wire fence. 
12 
MYRTLE WARBLER (Dendroica 
coronata) 
4 inches. 
Length, 5! The similarly colored 
Audubon’s warbler has a yellow throat instead 
of a white one. (See page 85.) 
Range: Breeds throughout most of the for- 
ested area of Canada and south to Minnesota, 
Michigan, New York, and Massachusetts; win- 
ters in the southern two-thirds of the United 
States and south to Panama. 
Habits and economic status: This member 
of our beautiful wood-warbler family—a fam- 
ily peculiar to America—has the characteristic 
voice, coloration, and habits of its kind. Trim 
of form and graceful of motion, when seeking 
food it combines the methods of the wrens, 
creepers, and flycatchers. It breeds only in 
the northern parts of the eastern United States, 
but in migration it occurs in every patch of 
woodland and is so numerous that it is fa- 
miliar to every observer. Its place is taken in 
the West by Audubon’s warbler. More than 
three-fourths of the food of the myrtle warbler 
consists of insects, practically all of them 
harmful. It is made up of small beetles, in- 
cluding some weevils, with many ants and 
wasps. This bird is so small and nimble that 
it successfully attacks insects too minute to be 
prey for larger birds. Scales and plant lice 
form a very considerable part of its diet. Flies 
are the largest item of food; in fact, only a 
few flycatchers and swallows eat as many flies 
as this bird. The vegetable food (22 per cent) 
is made up of fruit and the seeds of poison 
oak or ivy; also the seeds of pine and of the 
bayberry. 
BARN SWALLOW (Hirundo 
erythrogastra) 
Length, about 7 inches. Distinguished among 
our swallows by deeply forked tail. 
Range: Breeds throughout the United States 
(except the South Atlantic and Gulf States) 
and most of Canada; winters in South Amer- 
Tear 
Habits and economic status: This is one of 
the most familiar birds of the farm and one 
of the greatest insect destroyers. From day- 
light to dark on tireless wings it seeks its prey, 
and the insects destroyed are countless. Its 
favorite nesting site is a barn rafter, upon 
which it sticks its mud basket. Most modern 
barns are so tightly constructed that swallows 
cannot gain entrance, and in New England and 
some other parts of the country barn swallows 
are much iess numerous than formerly. Farm- 
ers can easily provide for the entrance and exit 
of the birds and so add materially to their 
numbers. It may be well to add that the para- 
sites that sometimes infest the nests of swal- 
lows are not the ones the careful housewife 
dreads, and no fear need be felt of the infesta- 
tion spreading to the houses, Insects taken on 
the wing constitute the almost exclusive diet 
of the barn swallow. More than one-third of 
the whole consists of flies. Beetles stand next 
in order and consist of many of the small dung 
beetles of the May-beetle family that swarm 
over the pastures in the late afternoon. 
