1898.] ESSAYS. 39 



grasshoppers and crickets. The rest of the food is mainly of 

 wild berries. There is no cultivated fruit at all on the list of 

 this bird's food, and it is one of the most valuable. Fortunately, 

 this last year it seems to have regained in numl)ers what it lost 

 two or three years ago in the winter when he suffered so much 

 from frost in the South, and the cold weather cut off the food 

 supply there, and great numbers of them died from starvation. 

 It is often worth while to know the vegetable foods and fruits 

 that it lives upon so as to be able to plant them in order to 

 attract birds. The Bluebird enjoys choke cherries, dogvvood, 

 bush cranberry, huckleberry, greenbrier, Virginia creeper, juni- 

 per, bitter-sweet, pokeberry, false spikenard, partridge berry, 

 and the wild sarsaparilla. 



The Robin is a very familiar bird of the gardens and orchards, 

 and is accused of eating cultivated fruits to a large extent, but 

 examinations show that less than five per cent, of his food is 

 grown by man. Nearly one-half is animal, including wasps, 

 ants, bugs, spiders, angleworms, and a large per cent, of 

 grasshoppers and crickets and caterpillars. He also eats great 

 numbers of March fly larvse, so preventing injury to the hay 

 crops. He has been supposed to feed largely on angleworms 

 from his well known habit of running over the grass, but we 

 find that the angleworm forms a small per cent. He picks up 

 a number of cutworms and an army of insects that lie in the 

 larviu state in the ground. Professor Forbes has asked the 

 question : " Will the destruction of seventeen quarts of aver- 

 age caterpillars, including at least eight quarts of cutworms, 

 pay for twenty-four quarts of cherries, blackberries, currants 

 and grapes?" and someone else makes the statement that " He 

 is a poor business man who pays $10 for what he knows must 

 later be sold for fifteen cents or less." Yet I have known of 

 instances where a robin that had saved from ten to fifteen bush- 

 els of apples that were worth a dollar a bushel, by clearing the 

 trees from canker worms in the spring, was shot when he picked 

 one of the apples that he had saved for the ungrateful owner. 

 The Robin is fond of wild fruits, and these may l)e planted to 

 draw his attention from the garden fruit — dogwood and wild 



