2J.8 Brewster oh the Pine Gt-osbcak. I t"j^ 



more or less widely and generally among all the trees of this 

 species in Cambridge. 



The celerity with which the Grosbeaks stripped a large ash, 

 laden with crowded clusters of the brownish, pendent fruit, was 

 surprising, even when due allowance is made for the great number 

 of birds. They distributed themselves pretty evenly over the 

 entire tree, although, as already stated, they usually attacked the 

 upper branches first. Each bird worked busily and silently and, 

 when the fruit was abundant, moved about but little, merely 

 bending forward and downward for a seed, and after this had 

 been sheared of its wings and eaten, reaching for another in the 

 same manner without changing its foothold. I have watched 

 over a hundred birds thus engaged for a minute or more without 

 hearing a sound save the light crackling rustle of the seeds as 

 they were rolled in the powerful bills. 



Next to the ash trees, the Grosbeaks preferred the Norway 

 spruces, the terminal buds of which they appeared to relish 

 greatly. The snow under every spruce of any size in the area 

 which the birds invaded was thickly strewn with fragments of 

 these buds. Mr. Walter Deane, who made a microscopic examin- 

 ation of these small fragments, and also of the branches of the 

 trees themselves, found that the birds ate only the nucleus, a 

 soft, greenish mass of tissue, scarcely larger than the head of an 

 ordinary pin, and lying at the base of the terminal or axillary buds. 

 This nucleus may be that of a future branch, cone, or staminate 

 blossom. The bird bites or breaks off the bud about midway 

 between its extremity and base, and picks out the nucleus, leaving 

 its protecting outer scales on the trees. The fragments found 

 under the trees consist of the terminal halves of these buds, either 

 intact, or broken into their component scales.^ The fruit of the 

 white ash is split along the middle of the flat sides from the base 

 well towards the extremity and sometimes into two halves. 



The Grosbeaks, as I have already said, sometimes fed without 

 making a sound except the cracking or crunching of their food, 

 but usually a low murmuring or whimpering whistle, audible 



* Mr. Deane has published some notes on this subject in the Botanical 

 Gazette (Vol. XVIII, No. 4, April, 1893, pp. 143, 144). 



