The Food of Birds. 131 



make one-tenth of the food — an exceptional occurrence 

 due to the fact that this was one of the chinch-bug years 

 in central Illinois and that three of these lairds had eaten 

 freely of that insect. Orthoptera stand at six per cent., 

 about equally distributed between the three families of 

 the crickets, locusts and grasshoppers. A specimen of 

 Tridactylus was noticed among the first and one of the 

 common katydids among the second. The fruits of this 

 month amount to thirty per cent., eaten by nine of the 

 birds. Half of these were cherries, and the remainder 

 ■\\ ere blackberries, grapes, elderberries, and the berries of 

 the mountain-ash. Fragments of corn amounted to eight- 

 een per cent, of the food. 



Sep t e m her. 



But two l)irds were shot in September, too few to give 

 any correct idea of the food of the month. It is only nec- 

 essary to say that these had eaten more largely of grass- 

 hoppers than the birds of the i^receding month, and to 

 about the same extent of fruits, all of which were grapes. 



S um ))i ar y for t Ji e year. 



Taking the food of the year together, we find that almost 

 precisely one-half of it consisted of insects. Spiders 

 amounted to but one per cent, and thousand-legs to but 

 three. The remainder of the food consisted equally of the 

 smaller garden fruits and the fragments of seeds and grain. 

 Thirteen per cent, of the food of these sixty-four l)irds con- 

 sisted of blackberries, four per cent, of raspberries, one per 

 cent, of strawberries and three per cent, of cherries. The 

 ants of the year stand at seven per cent., caterpillars at 

 six, and Diptera at only one. Coleoptera amounted to pre- 

 cisely one-fourth of the food, predaceous beetles to six per 

 cent, and Scaraba-ida^ to thirteen per cent., nearly all of 

 these being leaf-chafers. Spring-beetles and snout-beetles 

 each average two per cent., and Hemiptera and Orthop- 

 tera each stand at four. 



In the paper previously cited, published in the Transac- 

 tions of the Illinois Horticultural Society for 1879, I gave 

 a table of the food of this species based upon twenty- 



