262 Birds of Buzzard's Roost 



tune had overtaken his mate. * * * He stuck to the nest 

 for the next three days. Then he carried out the broken shells 

 and began bringing food for two mouths that were always 

 agape. * * * The undivided care of the family left little 

 time for personal attention. He looked shabby and forlorn by 

 the time the young birds were old enough to quit the nest and 

 seek their own food. Then he spent much time in mending his 

 appearance." 



The young are fed one at a time, and from the rim of the 

 nest as soon as they are able to climb up to it. When one has 

 been thus fed, it stands aside and makes way for another. A 

 favorite place for the young after they have left the nest is on 

 the stakes of a rail fence along a highway. These wood^ 

 peckers are very fond of cherries and carry many of them to 

 their young. When I was young they were regarded as 

 thieves, and a favorite pastime with the farmers was to set a 

 pole in the ground near a cherry tree for them to alight upon 

 and -when they did so, to strike it with the poll of an ax or 

 some other blunt instrument, and stun them so that they would 

 fall to the ground and become the easy victims of those who 

 begrudged them the cherries they were taking. This was a 

 cruel practice, for it not only took the lives of the old birds, 

 but their young who must necessarily starve to death. Happily 

 the people are being educated to the great value of these birds 

 and no longer begrudge them the cherries they take in feeding 

 their young, and the ruthless killing of them is a thing of the 

 past. A careful study of the food of these birds by the United 

 States Department of Agriculture shows that it consists of 

 fifty per cent, animal, forty-seven per cent, vegetable and three 

 per cent, mineral matter. The animal matter consists of ants, 

 wasps, beetles, grasshoppers, mot.hs, caterpillars, spiders, and 

 myriapods. Ants amounted to about eleven per cent; beetles 

 nearly one-third and grasshoppers and crickets six per cent, of 

 the food taken by them. Prof. Forbes, in his examination of 

 their food in Michigan found that thirty-two per cent, of it 

 consisted of canker worms. 



This woodpecker is sociable., playful and noisy. He loves 

 to play "hide and peep." This he does by alighting on the bole 

 of a tree near his observer and shuffling himself around on the 



