GRAIN. 69 



without any aid from crows. Whenever stock was fed with grain 

 they were always on hand to get their portion. They ate corn with 

 the pigs in the hog lot, and often outnumbered the little chickens in 

 the back yard around their rations of cracked corn or Indian mush. 

 Not satisfied with regular feeding times, they drew on the source of 

 supply, the corn house, and could be seen any day in the year, but 

 most commonly in winter, flying out of it, sometimes by the score. 



Other birds. — So far as is known, no other birds of the farm com- 

 mitted serious depredations on grain, though several occasionally did 

 ti'ifling harm. The red-winged blackbird did not disturb sprouting 

 grain, but was seen in the first week of August, 1898, to visit corn- 

 fields in flocks of from 12 to 20 and eat from roasting ears. Gold- 

 finches were troublesome in ripening oats on the Hungerford farm 

 during the last week of June, 1899. A flock of a hundred'spent most 

 of the day swaying on bending oat stems. Four were collected, but 

 singularly enough no grain was in their stomachs. On an acre of the 

 field where the birds usually assembled, 5 percent of the crop was 

 lost from the breaking down of stalks. 



If the mourning dove and the bobwhite do harm to grain it is so slight 

 as to escape notice. The dove, however, has been taken with a few 

 kernels of sprouting wheat in its crop." Both birds eat a good deal of 

 waste grain in stubble-fields. On August 31, 1898, in lot 4, there was 

 a flock of at least 30 doves in the wheat stubble of the Bryan farm, and 

 at the same time there were two smaller flocks on the Hungerford 

 place. In November, 1899, the flock on the upper part of the farm fed 

 with the bobwhites on wheat stubble, and, like them, did not appear to 

 relish corn dropped from the ear in fields where they were searching 

 for weed seed. There was considerable diversitj- of feeding habits 

 among different flocks of bobwhites on the two farms. One flock on the 

 Bryan farm during November and December, 1900, was seldom seen 

 on a patch of wheat stubble adjacent to their cover, the oak woods of 

 lot 5. Hawks were numerous there, however, and may have frightened 

 the birds away from what would ordinarily have been a tempting 

 feeding ground. A large covey on the lower part of the Hungerford 

 farm, where no wheat had been raised, fed entirely on weed seed, 

 but one at the upper end spent about all the feeding time in wheat 

 stubble. This covey had a habit of sleeping in a peach orchard, as 

 was attested by little rings of dung showing where the birds had 

 squatted in a circle with heads out and tails in. From six of these 

 rings, representing as many days' feeding, 300 droppings were col- 

 lected. Remains of wheat, or more strictly speaking, fragments of 

 bran from one-fifth of a millimeter to 5 millimeters in length, formed 

 85 percent of them. A bird of this covey had in its crop 160 whole 



''In Essex County, N. J., the dove does much damage in newly sown fields of 

 buckwheat. 



