THE ENGLISH SPARROW AND THE STARLING. 1 40 



insects are taken in large numbers, as are also grass! toppers, 

 and both the black and green aphides that occur on apple- 

 trees and rose-bushes are eaten greedily. On one occasion 

 a flock of sparrows completely cleaned the green aphis from 

 some rose-bushes near my windows. It took them several 

 days to finish their work, but they did it effectually in the 

 end." 



Of the food eaten by nestlings l more than half consists of 

 insects. In his account of the food of nestling birds Dr. Judd, 

 of the Department of Agriculture, has the following to say of 

 the English sparrow. 



" From April till August weevils and cutworms are taken 

 to the young from the Department lawns. Some interesting 

 observations on the insectivorous habits of young English 

 sparrows by Mr. George H. Berry, of North Livermore, Maine, 

 are worth repeating in this connection. 2 In a nest containing 

 three young he discovered the remains of two large moths, 

 the luna moth (Tropcea luna) and the cecropia moth (Samia 

 ceeropia), a swallow-tailed butterfly (Papilio turnus), a mourn- 

 ing-cloak butterfly (Vanessa antiopa), and an unbroken speci- 

 men of the hairy larva of that pest of shade-trees, the tussock 

 moth (Orgy-la leucostigma). When he placed a stick with 

 plenty of these larvae near another brood, the parent birds 

 at first paid no attention to them, but subsequently they fed 

 three of them to their young. During three hours of observa- 

 tion a pair of sparrows noted by Mr. Berry fed to their nest- 

 lings sixty small green worms. Multitudes of insects may be 

 destroyed in this way. One morning, in the vicinity of the 

 Department of Agriculture, thousands of winged white ants 

 (Termes flavipes) were noticed by the writer swarming over 

 the sidewalk, and among these insects, picking them up with 

 surprising quickness, were half a dozen adult English spar- 



1 See 1900 Yearbook, Dept. Agr., p. 421. 



2 Bulletin 1, Div. Ornith. and Mamm., Dept. Agr., p. 291, 1889. 



