No. 4.] BIRDS ON THE FARM. 135 



spot where the first two still lay. After several ineffectual 

 efforts, she succeeded in getting a firm hold on all three, 

 when she flew at once to her nest near by, fed them to her 

 young and came back for more. The whole proceeding did 

 not occupy five minutes. These grubs were dug out by the 

 robins wherever they could be found. They took them 

 from compost heaps, from beneath the mulch about the fruit 

 trees, and seemed to know, as if by instinct, just where to 

 find them. It should not be inferred, however, that they 

 found these grubs by instinct. Their skill in finding them 

 was acquired, and no doubt was entirely a matter of early 

 education, except in so far as their keen faculties of observa- 

 tion were transmitted to them by their parents. The young 

 robins, when the}- first left the nest, were nearly helpless so 

 far as finding food was concerned, and it was some weeks 

 before they had learned to find grubs with certainty. At 

 first they were fed almost entirely by the parents ; later, 

 they learned to pick up objects from the ground and to pur- 

 sue crawling insects ; but they did not acquire, during their 

 first summer, the skill evinced by their parents in digging 

 out grubs. An adult bird, when once it began to dig, sel- 

 dom missed the worm or grub. The 3'oung birds frequently 

 failed to secure their prey, and were fed more or less by the 

 old birds for some weeks after leaving the nest. 



The first season (1901) we set out a few rows of straw- 

 berry plants of different varieties, to determine which were 

 best suited to the soil. It is perhaps needless to add that 

 the robins got nearly all of the fruit. This created, as it 

 usually does, a rather unreasonable prejudice against the 

 birds. In this the whole family shared ; but, had the robins 

 been killed then, there is little doubt that our strawberry 

 beds would have been ruined in 1902. A close watch was 

 kept on the robins in the strawberry bed in 1901, and they 

 were seen to devour, on the average, five insects to each 

 strawberry. These insects were nearly all such as were 

 injurious to strawberry plants, and were taken either from 

 the plants they were feeding on or from the ground beneath. 

 When in 1902 the number of strawberry rows was much 

 increased, the injury done by robins to the fruit was pro- 



