Great quantities of Bird Food. 77 



highest levels of snow and ice. The seed-eating 

 birds find sufficient food in the rich hay, thick and 

 sweet with flowers, which covers the whole of the 

 Alpine pastures from May to July, and abundance 

 of corn, flax, and fruit in the valleys : in the steep 

 pine-woods that usually separate these valleys 

 from the pastures, the larger seed-eaters enjoy an 

 endless supply of fir-cones. The insect-eating 

 birds are still more fortunate. Nothing is more 

 striking in the Alps than the extraordinary abun- 

 dance in the summer of insects of all kinds, as we 

 know to our cost in the sun-baked valleys ; and 

 on the mountains it is equally wonderful though 

 less annoying. There it is that the beetles have 

 their paradise. In loose heaps of stone, often 

 collected to clear a stony pasture ; in the wooden 

 palings used to separate alp from alp ; in the 

 decaying lumber of the pine-forests, beetles both 

 small and great are absolutely swarming. A 

 clergyman, pastor of a valley near Meiringen, who 

 collected them, found more than eight hundred 

 different species in his parish alone. All the birds 

 shot for me at the Engstlen-alp had been living 

 on a diet of minute beetles as their principal food. 



