WINTER FEEDING HABITS 285 



are two cock robins. One enters daily, and as soon as 

 the window is opened. The rather less punctual and 

 courageous bird is chased away when he dares to follow. 

 Now the robin, being omnivorous, is an easy bird to 

 feed, but his passion is for fat in the form of butter. 

 That is the food that will bring him to the breakfast 

 table and within the house. He will eat porridge, a food 

 that most birds avoid as being sticky on the beak, though 

 most birds relish it in the dry and powdery state. He 

 will eat half-rotten potatoes, which indeed proved 

 supremely attractive to all six species of bird on the cot 

 tage lawn. They battened on them as a gorgeous 

 admiral or peacock butterfly will dope itself with a rot 

 ting windfall in late autumn, 



It is, of course, difficult to find a form of food that 

 most birds will not eat in the hungry months. It is a 

 strange though an adaptive fact that most classes of 

 creature change their habits about the same date. Take 

 some unrelated facts recently announced : the grub of 

 the Colorado beetle is safely underground by October 14. 

 The hedgehog becomes a vegetarian, instead of a partial 

 flesh-eater, about October 14. For myself, I once made 

 some little research into the feeding habits of the par 

 tridge, and found that it becomes not only vegetarian but 

 chiefly a salad-eater as November approached. The flesh 

 of the late partridge, like all flesh, is grass. Birds that 

 are not usually fruit-eaters will delight in fruit, though 

 their taste is capricious : a large Blenheim orange that 

 had become woolly was consumed at great speed by little 

 beaks and big beaks. Another nameless apple was 

 entirely scorned. Yet some birds remain irremediably 

 carnivorous if there is any choice : the wren and the 

 green woodpecker (one of which has a peculiar fondness 

 for ants in the garden) are examples ; and nearly all share 



