A FAMILY OF LIVELY SINGERS 51 



see him on the ground calmly lookMg for a grasshopper or 

 daintily helping himself to a morsel from the dog's plate 

 at the kitchen door. Suddenly, with a jerk and a jump, he 

 has sprung into the air to seize a passing moth. There is 

 always the pleasure of variety and the unexpected about 

 the friendly, intelligent catbird. 



He has a keen appetite for so many pests of the garden 

 and orchard — ^moths, grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, 

 spiders, flies and other insects — that his friendship is well 

 worth cultivating. Five catbirds.whose diet was carefully 

 watched by scientific men in Washington, ate thirty grass- 

 hoppers each for one meal. 



How many people ignorantly abuse the catbird ! Because 

 he has the good taste to like strawberries and cherries as 

 well as we do, is he to be condemned on that account? If 

 he kills insects for us every waking hour from April to 

 October, is he not entitled to a little fruit in June? The ox 

 that treadeth out the corn is not to be muzzled. A good 

 way to protect our strawberry patches and cherry trees 

 from catbirds, mocking-birds, and robins, is to provide 

 fruit that they like much better — the red mulberry. Nothing 

 attracts so many birds to a place. A mulberry tree in the 

 chicken-yard provides a very popular restaurant, not only 

 for the song birds among the branches, but for the scratch- 

 ers on the ground floor. 



Like the yellow-breasted chat, the catbird likes to hide 

 its nest in a tangle of cat brier along the roadside under- 

 growth and in bushy, woodland thickets. Last winter, 

 when that vicious vine had lost every leaf, I counted 

 in it eighteen catbird nests within a quarter of a mile 

 along a country lane. Long before the first snowstorm, 

 the inmates of those nests were enjoying summer weather 



