58 The Wilson Bulletin. 



flesh-eating birds must have flesh, and the grain-eating birds, 

 including the sparrows and Bob-white, and the Ruffed 

 Grouse, of course, live on vegetable matter. It is hardly 

 going beyond the facts to say that the smaller insect- eating 

 birds will take anything that can be found. The wood- 

 peckers eat large proportions of seeds and other vegetable 

 matter, in winter, and so do the nuthatches, and tit-mice. 

 The Brown Creeper may not eat vegetable matter. Crows 

 and jays eat anything. In the severest weather, when the 

 north of Ohio is covered with snow but the southern part 

 is free from it, or nearly so, as sometimes happens, the birds 

 of prey go to the less snowy regions and remain until there 

 is a change, food being easier to obtain under such condi- 

 tions. 



If there is one lesson which the study of birds in winter 

 teaches more than another, it is that there can be no hard 

 and fast line drawn in respect to what birds will eat when 

 their ordinary food is hard to get or wholly wanting. Birds 

 that are supposed to subsist wholly upon insects or similar 

 food, will take large proportions of vegetable food in win- 

 ter. The soft inner bark of many trees furnishes a never 

 failing supply of food for some of the woodpeckers at least. 

 One needs to think but a moment to perceive that one of 

 the essentials of a bird whose residence is in a nothern re- 

 gion for the whole year, is the ability to adapt itself to the 

 conditions, which are certain to be variable. Winter bird 

 life is but one of the chapters in the story of the develop- 

 ment of the intensely interesting class — Birds. 



