No. 4.] DESTRUCTION OF BIRDS. 471 



j)oi'ted b}' thi' Messrs. Reed and others. Mr. Bangs states 

 that about Warehain pheasants and grouse suffered severely. 

 Througliout the State sportsmen and ornithologists found an 

 unusual scarcity of young grouse and bobwhites at this time. 

 In Concord I judged the mortality among five broods of 

 young grouse to average about seventy per cent, but others 

 appear to find it much greater elsewhere. The effect of the 

 storm was most severe on the grouse, as many of the quail 

 reared second broods later. The mortality among grouse 

 probably extended from western Maine southward and west- 

 ward throughout most of the area of heavy rainfall in south- 

 ern New England. 



Mr. Herbert Moulton of Hiram, Me., says that a brood 

 of twelve or thirteen young grouse was seen almost daily 

 by his neighbor. AVhen the cold rains set in they lost num- 

 bers rapidly, and when last seen only two were left, so 

 weakened that they could be readily picked up in the hand. 

 In the shooting season no young birds could be found. 



Many reports of this nature have come in. Mr. Perry of 

 Worcester states that ' ' there are no young of the ruffed 



grouse 





This destruction of the grouse is now so well known and so 

 ofenerallv acknowledo-ed that it is unnecessary to dwell on it 

 here. The rain seems to be the chief cause. The young birds 

 which I examined were not infested with ticks, but were wet 

 and nearly helpless. There may be a disease among the 

 young grouse that is favored by wet weather. Possibly 

 grouse will now be most plenty in northern and eastern 

 Maine and in northern Vermont, where the storms were not 

 severe, provided the young birds were not destroyed by 

 forest fires. 



Strange as it n\a,y seem, the disaster to the insectivorous 

 birds did not end with the destruction of the nests, e^gs or 

 young. From either the scarcity of insects, the flooding of 

 the breeding places or some other cause, most of them did 

 not attempt to breed again, so that many species raised 

 hardly any young during the season. This alone might be 

 expected to result in a scarcity of such species this year. 

 But the destruction wrought by the elements went even fur- 



