insects, he much more than compensates for the damage done by his occasional lapses into 
vegetarianism. The quantity of worms and insects which he devours is enormous, 
indeed hardly credible. Professor Treadwell experimented on some young Robins kept in 
captivity, with a view of determining the amount of food necessary to maintain them, 
and found that each one required sixty-eight worms per day. That is to say, each bird 
‘ate forty-one per cent. more than its own weight in twelve hours. The length of these 
worms, if laid end to end, would be about fourteen feet. Man at this rate would eat about 
seventy pounds of flesh a day, and drink five or six gallons of water.” 
Well may Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in OuT of Door Papers, exclaim at the 
‘exhausting labor of yonder Robin, whose winged, picturesque day is spent in putting 
worms into insatiable beaks at the rate of one morsel in every three minutes.” 
The American Robin must not be confounded with the Robin Redbreast of English 
nursery tales. The two are not at all alike. The American Bluebird approaches most nearly 
of any of our birds to those which provided the celebrated sleeping babes with their leafy 
covering. 
