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SONGLESS BIRD 8 OF ORCHARD AND WOODLAND. 273 



feed on the potato beetle and other very injurious leaf-eating 



beetles, including flea beetles, grape-vine beetles, and May 



beetles. Also, they take wood-boring beetles, which they 



find mainly about stumps and fallen trees. 



Ants are eaten, and bugs, including leaf 



hoppers and tree hoppers. Many birds eat 



gall insects, but the Grouse eats them galls 



and all. Besides the insects taken, it eats Fig. 124. -Tree 



a few spiders and small snails. hoppers. 



Although Grouse eat largely of insects during spring and 

 summer, this habit has not been much noticed, chiefly be- 

 cause most of the birds whose stomachs have been examined 

 were shot in the late fall or in the winter months, Avhen the 

 food is almost entirely vegetable. "The Ruffed Grouse," 

 says Dr. Judd, "spends most of its feeding time in browsing 

 and berry picking." In the fall, winter, and early spring, 

 seeds, berries, buds, leaves, and even twigs, form its prin- 

 cipal food. A great deal of this material is eaten through- 

 out the year wherever it can be obtained. Dr. Judd gives 

 the percentage of "browse" eaten as forty-eight and eleven 

 hundredths of its entire food for the season, and the per- 

 centage of berries as twenty-eight and thirty-two hundredths. 

 Buds form twenty per cent, of its food for the year. The 

 seeds eaten are mainly tree seed, and those of such weeds 

 as grow in clearings, along walls and fences, or on the 

 borders of woods. Grain is very rarely taken. A partial 

 list of the vegetable food of the Grouse is given below. 

 It is largely compiled from the bulletin by Dr. Judd on the 

 Grouse and Wild Turkeys of the United States, which con- 

 tains the most complete list yet published. 



Nuls or Seeds. 

 Hazelnuts, beechnuts, chestnuts, acorns. Seeds of tick trefoil, horn- 

 beam, vetch, hemlock, pitch pine, maple, blackberry lily, beggar- 

 ticks, chickweed, sheep sorrel, sedges, violet, witch-hazel, beech drops, 

 avens, persicaria, frost weed, jewel weed. 



Buds, Blossoms, or Foliage. 

 Of poplar, birch, willow, apple, pear, peach, alder, hazel, beech, 

 ironwood, hornbeam, blackberry, blueberry, spruce, arbor vitfe, May- 

 flower, laurel, maple, spicebush, partridge berry, sheep sorrel, aster. 



