432 GRINNELL, The California Thrasher. ees 
the great interior valleys, there the Thrasher abounds. The 
writer’s personal field acquaintance with this bird gives basis for 
the following analysis of habitat relations. 
The California Thrasher is a habitual forager beneath dense 
and continuous cover. Furthermore, probably two-thirds of its 
foraging is done on the ground. In seeking food above ground, 
as when patronizing cascara bushes, the thrasher rarely mounts 
to an exposed position, but only goes as high as is essential to 
securing the coveted fruits. The bird may be characterized as 
semi-terrestrial, but always dependent upon vegetational cover; 
and this cover must be of the chaparral type, open next to the 
ground, with strongly interlacing ‘branch-work and evergreen leafy 
canopy close above — not forest under-growth, or close-set, upright 
stems as in new-growth willow, or matted leafage as in rank- 
growing annual herbage. 
The Thrasher is relatively omnivorous in its diet. Beal (Bio- 
logical Survey Bulletin no. 30, p. 55) examined 82 stomachs of 
Toxostoma redivivum and found that 59 percent of the food was of a 
vegetable nature and 41 animal. A large part of this food con- 
sisted of ground-beetles, ants, and seeds, such as are undoubtedly 
obtained by working over the litter beneath chaparral. The bird’s 
most conspicuous structural feature, the long curved bill, is used to 
whisk aside the litter, and also to dig, pick-fashion, into soft earth 
where insects lie concealed. Ground much frequented by Thrashers 
shows numerous little pits in the soil surface, less than an inch deep, 
steep on one side and with a little heap of earth piled up on the 
opposite side. As already intimated, the Thrasher at times ascends 
to the foliage above, for fruit and doubtless some insects. Much in 
the way of berries and seeds may also be recovered from the ground 
in what is evidently the Thrasher’s own specialized method of food- 
getting. Even granting this specialization, I do not see why the 
chaparral, alone, should afford the exclusive forage-ground; for the 
same mode of food-getting ought to be just as useful on the forest 
floor, or even on the meadow. The further fact, of widely omni- 
vorous diet, leads one to conclude that it is not any peculiarity of 
food-source, or way of getting at it, that alone limits the Thrasher 
associationally. We must look: farther. 
The amateur observer, or collector of specimens, is struck by the 
