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Kinglets Captured by Burdocks 



On an afternoon in October, some ten 

 years ago, a student, Mr. Floyd Hartman, 

 came into my laboratory in Lake Forest, 

 Illinois, and told me that he had just 

 liberated a little bird which he had found 

 struggling to free itself from the hooks of 

 some ripening burdock heads, in which 

 its feathers were hopelessly entangled. 

 He also stated that he had noticed several 

 other similar birds that had been unable 

 to free themselves, and had perished. 

 I asked him to show me the place. It was 

 a partly wooded pasture, in the northern 

 part of the town, within a block of the 

 railroad. The trees were white oaks and 

 hickories; all underbrush had been thinned 

 out, and in its place had grown scattering 

 clumps of burdocks. The birds were all 

 Golden-crowned Kinglets. 

 It was no trouble to find 

 them. They were visible in 

 all directions, scores of 

 them sticking to the tops of 

 the clumps on the most ex- 

 posed clusters of heads. The 

 struggle had ended fatally 

 for all that I saw, and its 

 severity was evidenced by 

 the attitudes of their bodies 

 and the disheveled condition 

 of their plumage. 



I e.xamined a number of 

 the burdock heads to de- 

 termine what attraction had 

 brought the Kinglets within 

 range of the hooks, and 

 found insect larvae of two 

 species present in consider- 

 able abundance. Most 

 abundant were the seed- 

 eating larvae of an obscure 

 little moth (Metzgeria la- 

 pella), but the larvae of the 

 well-known burdock weevil 

 were also present in some 

 numbers. Doubtless, it was 



in attempting to get these larva; that the 

 Kinglets (mostly young birds) were cap- 

 tured. 



In the few minutes that I had to spare 

 I gathered a few clusters of burdock tops 

 and carried them with the birds upon them 

 into my laboratory, and made half a dozen 

 photographs of them, from three of which 

 the accompanying figures are reproduced. 

 Shortly thereafter I learned that Mr. W. 

 Hamilton Gibson had published a draw- 

 ing of this same sort of fatality a good 



GOLDEN-CROWNED KINGLETS IN BURDOCK 

 (261) 



