WHAT I HAVE DONE WITH BIRDS 



ture for that treat what he would not for his nestlings. And how 

 his sharp beak did shear into it ! 



Ornithologists tell us that the diet of a Black Vulture is car- 

 rion. To reasonable people that should be construed as a general 

 principle, and not taken to mean that if a Vulture eats a morsel of 

 anything else it can not be a Vulture. Once during a Vulture 

 series in the Limberlost a bird of this family in close quarters 

 presented me with his dinner. In his regurgitations there were 

 dark streaks I did not understand, and so I investigated. They 

 were grass! Later I saw him down in a fence-corner, snipping 

 grass like a Goose, and the week following his mate ate a quan- 

 tity of catnip with evident relish. Then some red raspberries 

 were placed in the door of their log and both of them ate the 

 fruit. 



In the regurgitations of a Kingfisher there can be found the 

 striped legs of grasshoppers and the seeds of several different 

 kinds of berries. All grain- and seed-eaters snap up a bug or 

 worm here and there. All insect-eaters vary their diet with bugs 

 and berries and all meat- and carrion-eaters crave some vegetable 

 diet. 



Through repeated experience with the same pairs I know that 

 Cardinals of my locality nest twice in a season, and I believe there 

 are cases where they do three times, as I have photographed young 

 in a nest as late as the twenty-ninth of August. Had it not been 

 that a pair were courting for a second mating about a nest still 

 containing their young, almost ready to go, such a picture as this 

 pair of Courting Cardinals never would have been possible to me. 

 But after one brooding they became so accustomed to me that 

 they flitted about their home, making love as well as feeding the 

 nestlings. Repeatedly in my work I have followed a pair of 

 cardinals from one nest to a new location a few rods away where 

 they continued operations about a second brooding. 



17 



