28 BOBWHITE AND OTHER (iUAILS Ol* UJTITED STiTEg.- 



feeder, nearly twice as large a proportion of beetles as of grass- 

 hoppers. The meadow lark, per contra, another terrestrial feeder, 

 takes 29 per cent of grasshoppers and only 18 per cent of beetles. 



The food of the bob white for the year is noteworthy in several 

 respects. Its character varies with the season. From October to 

 March it consists almost exclusively of vegetable mattei" — for Febru- 

 ary and March 99.8 per cent of vegetable food appearing in analysis — 

 while in late spring and in summer it is made up largely of insects, 

 August showing 44.1 per cent of insect food. The grain taken, as a 

 rule, is derived neither from newly sown fields nor from standing 

 crops, but is gleaned from stubble fields after harvest. Grain forms 

 a less prominent part of the food than the seeds of weeds, which are 

 the most important element of all and make up one-half of the food 

 for the year. The most distinctive feature of this, as a whole, is the 

 large proportion — 15.52 per cent — of leguminous seeds, a food seldom 

 eaten by the various species of sparrows or other terrestrial feeders. 

 A small fraction of this seed comes from cultivated plants, especially 

 the cowpea; the rest is derived from wild plants, most of them 

 classed as weeds. Leguminous seeds appear to be most largely con- 

 sumed during December, when they form 25 per cent of the food. 

 The 15.05 per cent of insect food, although a comparatively small 

 part of the total, is of extreme importance, since it contains many 

 pests that are generally avoided by nongallinaceous birds. Note- 

 worthy among these are the potato beetle, twelve-spotted cucumber 

 beetle, striped cucumber beetle, squash ladybird beetle, various cut- 

 worms, the tobacco worm, army worm, cotton worm, cotton bollworm, 

 the clover weevil, cotton boll weevil, imbricated snout beetle, May 

 beetle, click beetle, the red-legged grasshopper. Rocky Mountain 

 locust, and chinch bug. 



It should be observed that in the search for these pests and for 

 weed seeds the bobwhite, unlike many birds of the woodland, hedge- 

 row, and orchard, extends its foraging to the center of the largest 

 fields, thus protecting the growing crops. 



Grain as Food. 



Vegetable matter has long been known to be an important element 

 of the food of the bobwhite; indeed, many people suppose that it 

 constitutes the entire food of the bird. The impression that the bob- 

 white eats little else than grain has prevailed even among many 

 sportsmen who have bagged most of their game in the stubble field. 

 The present analysis, however, discloses that grain forms scarcely 

 more than one-sixth of the food. Laboratory study shows that it is 

 eaten in every month of the year, the maximum amount, 46 per cent 

 of the food for the month, having been taken in March. In the 



