SONGLESS BIRDS 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 x 
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. mee 
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, when 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 is 
the most complete list yet published. 
Nuts or Seeds. 
Hazelnuts, beechnuts, chestnuts, acorns. Seeds of tick trefoil, horn- 
beam, vetch, hemlock, pitch pine, maple, blackberry lily, beggar's 
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 vite, May- 
flower, laurel, maple, spicebush, partridge berry, sheep sorrel, aster, 
