6 
orchards. It is easy to see why this should be so. If, as we have 
already found to be the case, there are birds which resort to orchards 
for special purposes, we should expect to see them coming together 
in larger numbers to the unit of area in small, scattered orchards than 
in large orchards rather near each other. Indeed, we might well have 
expected that this concentration of birds in the orchards of a general 
farming district would have gone much farther than it has. In di- 
minishing the ratio of orchards to other lands some thirty-seven times, 
we have increased the density of the bird population of the orchard only 
three times—evidence that the orchards are at best a convenience rather 
than a necessity to most of the birds which are found in them. 
Comparing the lists of dominant species in the orchards of the 
two surveys, we find that while there were 42 species found in our 84 
acres of farm orchards, 11 of which species made up 72 per cent. of 
the whole, there were 72 species found in the 774.5 acres of commer- 
cial orchards, 9 of which made up 87 per cent. of the whole number, 
and that 6 of the 9 dominant species were common to both lists. These 
were the quail, field sparrow, blue jay, mourning dove, brown thrasher, 
and English sparrow. 
It was rather surprising to find the English sparrow first on the 
list of the most abundant farm-orchard birds and last on the corre- 
sponding commercial-orchard list, with 407 to the square mile in the 
first situation and only 56 in the second—seven or eight times as abund- 
ant in the farm orchard as in the commercial orchard; but this was no 
doubt due in great part to a fact already mentioned, that the center of 
abundance for this bird is in yards around the house and barn, and 
that it simply spreads from these to the adjacent orchards for shelter 
and refuge, with the result that its numbers per square mile of orchards 
is much smaller in a district where orchards are large and numerous 
than where they are small and few. 
The fact that the number of mourning doves to the square mile 
was but 77 in commercial orchards, while it was 297 in the small 
orchards of the farm, may have a similar explanation, the orchard being 
one of the favorite nesting places of this bird. On the other hand, the 
quail, the field sparrow, and the blue jay were even more abundant to 
the mile in the commercial than in the farm orchard, and the brown 
thrasher was but little less so; but the orchard oriole and the robin, 
occurring in farm orchards at ratios of 168 and 164 to the square mile 
respectively, were not once met with in the 129 miles of travel through 
these commercial orchards. This fact was due in all probability, to 
the relatively late period of the observations of 1908, falling, as they did, 
beyond the nesting season of these birds. 
Orchard Birds par excellence—In view of the fact that in the 
commercial-orchard district only 56 per cent. of the area studied was 
actually in orchards, the remainder being made up of the usual variety 
of farm situations, it seems to us that if there were distinctive orchard 
species of birds, they should be distinguished here by their much larger 
