﻿512 



Canadian Record of Science. 



Their vegetable food is limited almost exclusively 

 to hard seeds. This might seem to indicate that the 

 birds feed to some extent upon grain, but the stomachs 

 examined show only one kind — oats — and but little of 

 that. The great bulk of the food is made up of grass and 

 weed seed, which form almost the entire diet during 

 winter, and the amount consumed is immense. 



Anyone acquainted with the agricultural region of the 

 Upper Mississippi Valley can not have failed to notice 

 the enormous growth of weeds in every waste spot where 

 the original sward has been disturbed. By the roadside, 

 on the borders of cultivated fields, or in abandoned fields, 

 wherever they can obtain a foothold, masses of rank 

 weeds spring up, and often form impenetrable thickets 

 which afford food and shelter for immense numbers of 

 birds and enable them to withstand the great cold and the 

 most terrible blizzards. A person visiting one of these 

 weed patches on a sunny morning in January, when the 

 thermometer is 20° or more below zero, will be struck with 

 the life and animation of the busy little inhabitants. 

 Instead of sitting forlorn and half frozen, they may be seen 

 flitting from branch to branch, twittering and fluttering, 

 and showing every evidence of enjoyment and perfect 

 comfort. If one of them be killed and examined, it will 

 be found in excellent condition — in fact, a veritable ball of 

 fat. 



The snowbird {Junco hyemalis) and tree sparrow (Spiz- 

 ella monticola) are perhaps the most numerous of all the 

 sparrows. The latter fairly swarms all over the Northern 

 States in winter, arriving from the north early in October 

 and leaving in April. Examination of many stomachs 

 shows that in winter the tree sparrow feeds entirely upon 

 the seeds of weeds ; and probably each bird consumes 

 about one-fourth of an ounce a day. In an article con- 

 tributed to the New York Tribune in 1881 the writer 

 estimated the amount of weed seed annually destroyed by 



