No. 4.] REPORT OF STATE ORNITHOLOGIST. 169 



Ululated to the eli'ect that birds are now learning to feed 

 upon these eggs. At first egg clusters were found slightly 

 damaged, as if pecked at ; later the birds were seen pecking at 

 them. 



Messrs. H. B. Bigelow and Wilfred Wheeler of Concord 

 have noticed that the birds are eating these eggs. The ques- 

 tion at once arises whether the birds do not scatter more eggs 

 than they eat, and leave them to hatch on the ground. But 

 Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Wilson H. Fay state that they have 

 watched the birds feeding on these eggs and have searched 

 carefully on the newly fallen snow below, but have been 

 unable to find any eggs there. Formerly the birds merely 

 pecked into the cluster, scattering the eggs about ; now they 

 are learning to eat them clean. I examined many trees in 

 Concord where the birds had been at work, and found many 

 egg clusters from which all the eggs had been removed. Mr. 

 Fay spent several winter days observing the birds. He re- 

 ]X)rts that he saw a downy woodpecker peek into an egg mass 

 one hundred and twenty times within a minute. He states 

 that chickadees, brown creepers and golden-crowned kinglets 

 also apparently eat the eggs. Dr. G. W. Field, chairman of 

 the Massachusetts Commission on Fisheries and Game, in- 

 forms me that nuthatches eat them. Dr. A. W. Tuttle of 

 Cambridge states that at his camp the birds have destroyed 

 a great part of the eggs of the gypsy moth. He regards the 

 downy woodpecker as the most efficient worker in this respect. 



Fear has been expressed that the eggs of the moth may 

 pass through the alimentary canals of the birds unbroken 

 and undigested, and may afterwards hatch, and that in this 

 way the birds will become distributors of the insects. Exper- 

 iments that were made before 1896 with the crow and the 

 English sparrow showed that the eggs which passed through 

 the digestive tract of those birds were killed in the process of 

 digestion, although the shells of some of them were unbroken. 

 This indicates that there is no distribution of living eggs 

 to any distance by egg-eating birds, and if the birds are be- 

 ginning to eat the eggs of this moth, they will ])r()l)nbly be- 

 come as useful eventuallv as Euro]iean birds, which have 



