430 
Att Brrps IN Hasirats, Fatt or 1906, Centra ILLINOIS 
Acreage Nos. Birds Birds per sq. mi. 
Corn 1745.17 1617 593 
Wheat 163.68 46 180 
Stubble 952.87 573 385 
Pasture 1198.47 2787 1490 
Meadows 216.23 212 628 
Plowed ground 166.61 171 657 
Orchards 51.54 212 2633 
Woods 11.48 22 1226 
Shrubbery 10.60 63 3804 
Yards and gardens 37.60 155 2638 
Waste and fallow 65.45 462 4518 
Miscellaneous 4.00 62 9920 
Open fields 4443.03 5406 779 
Woods, etc. 180.67 976 3457 
On a fifth part of the area of pastures, meadows had less than half 
as many birds to the square mile, and plowed ground had nearly the 
same number per square mile as meadows. Young wheat, after the 
plant has started to grow, has evidently very little to offer the migrating 
bird, or to the fall resident, for that matter, but stubble fields doubtless 
offer some food. The especially striking feature of the situation is the 
very extraordinary number of birds found on all tracts covered by 
trees, shrubbery, and other rank vegetation like that of waste and 
- fallow lands. Our areas of orchards, woods, shrubbery, yards and 
gardens, and wastes and fallows, are severally too small to have much 
meaning, notwithstanding a density of bird life in all ranging from 1226 
to 4518 per square mile; but if we throw these tracts together into one 
fairly adequate total of 180.7 acres, we have an average density of 
3457 birds to the square mile for the whole area as compared with 1490 
for the very attractive pastures or 779 to the square mile for 4443 acres 
of open fields. Food in the pastures and both food and sheltered rest- 
ing places in the other situations after the fatigues of their migration 
flights perhaps account for both these choices. 
Our table of birds per square mile in fall in southern Illinois habitats 
is so distorted by the occurrence of large flocks of crows and black- 
birds in corn, stubble, and woods that these must be eliminated to give 
us numbers comparable with those of central Ilinois. This being done, 
we have in the two sections the same distinction between numbers of 
birds in the open fields and those in trees and shrubbery—that is woods, 
orchards, shrubbery, waste and fallow lands, and yards and gardens; 
the former averaging 621 birds per square mile on an area of 1439 
acres and the latter averaging 2365 per square mile on a total of 401.5 
acres. Wheat was in both sections visited by the smallest numbers of 
birds, but corn fields surpassed pastures in southern Illinois in the num- 
bers resorting to them. . 
