19 



small locusts to their young, and a pair of rock wrens took in 

 another hour 32 locusts to their nest. 1 



Dr. C. M. Weed and Mr. W. S. Fiske watched the nest of a 

 chipping sparrow from 3.40 A.M. to 7.49 P.M. 2 The birds made 

 almost 200 trips to the nest in that time. They were busy 

 from daylight to dark, and the food so far as identified con- 

 sisted largely of caterpillars. 



Quantity of Insect Food required by Adult Birds. 



The constant activity of adult birds is such that they require 

 an enormous quantity of food to repair the waste of the tissues. 

 Mr. Robert Ridgway fed a pet Arkansas kingbird 120 grass- 

 hoppers in a single day. 3 Those who examine the contents of 

 birds' stomachs find in them the remains of astonishing num- 

 bers of insects. Professor Beal says that oftentimes when a 

 stomach has been opened and the contents placed in a pile, the 

 heap expands until it becomes two or three times as large as 

 the stomach was originally with all the food in it. He found 

 in the stomach of a yellow-billed cuckoo remains of 217 fall 

 webworms, and in another, 250 tent caterpillars. Sixty grass- 

 hoppers were found in the stomach of a nighthawk. Professor 

 Harvey told me that he took 500 mosquitoes from another 

 nighthawk's stomach. Dr. Judd says that the stomachs of four 

 bank swallows contained 200 ants, and that a nighthawk has 

 been known to eat 1,000 at a single meal. In the stomach of a 

 Franklin's gull there were 70 entire grasshoppers and the jaws 

 of 56 more; in another, 90 grasshoppers and 102 additional 

 jaws; in another, 48 grasshoppers and 70 jaws. 4 



Some estimates of the quantities of insects eaten by birds in 

 different States of the Union have been made, and as the 

 figures are very conservative the results in brief are given 

 below. The birds of Massachusetts destroy 21,000 bushels of 

 insects daily (estimated) (Reed); the birds of Pennsylvania, 

 2,880,000,000 insects daily (Kalbfus); and the birds of 

 Nebraska, 170 carloads each day (Bruner). These figures may 



1 Aughey, S. A.: Notes on the Nature of the Food of Nebraska Birds, First Report of the 

 United States Entomological Commission, 1877, Appendix, p. 18. 

 1 Bulletin No. 55, New Hampshire College Agricultural Experiment Station, 1898. 

 American Naturalist, Vol. Ill, 1869, p. 310. 

 Useful Birds and their Protection, 1907, pp. 57-61. 



