ALIMENT. 321 
how recently they have passed. This cropping is done by the 
animal without stopping to feed, but as it walks along. They 
take the various kinds of grasses found in their range freely, 
though I lack the evidence to show that they are as fond of 
aquatic vegetation as is the moose. After all, their great re- 
source is the reindeer moss, which, in many places, burdens the 
ground to great depths, sometimes even two or three feet, where 
scarcely any other vegetation can survive. 
Of the Woodland Caribou, Captain Hardy says: “ The 
Caribou feeds principally on the Cladonia rangiferina, with 
which barrens and all permanent clearings in the fir forests are 
thickly carpeted, and which appears to grow more luxuriantly in 
the sub-arctic regions than in more temperate latitudes. Mr. 
Hind, in ‘Explorations in Labrador,’ describes the beauty and 
luxuriance of this moss in the Laurentian country, ‘ with ad- 
miration for which,’ he says, ‘the traveler is inspired, as well as 
for its wonderful adaptation to the climate, and its value as a 
source of food to the mainstay of the Indian, and consequently 
of the fur trade in these regions,—the Caribou. The recently 
announced discovery by a French chemist, who has succeeded in 
extracting alcohol in large quantities from lichens, and especially 
from the reindeer moss (identical in Europe with that of Amer- 
ica), is interesting, and readily suggests the value of this prim- 
itive vegetation, in supporting animal life in that boreal climate, 
as a heat-producing food. Besides the above, which appears to be 
its staple food, the Caribou partakes of the tripe de roche (Sticta 
pulmonaria), and other parasitic lichens growing on the bark of 
trees, and is exceedingly fond of the Usnea which grows on the 
boughs (especially affecting the tops) of the black spruce, in 
long pendent hanks. In the forests on the Cumberland Hills, in 
Nova Scotia, I have observed the snow quite trodden down during 
the night by the Caribou, which had resorted to feed on the ‘ old 
men’s beards’ in the tops of the spruces, felled by the lumberers 
on the day previous. In the same locality, I have observed such 
frequent scratchings in the first light snows of the season at the 
foot of the trees in beech groves, that I am convinced that the 
animal, like the bear, is partial to the rich food afforded by the 
moss. Iam not aware that the favorite item of the diet of the 
Norwegian reindeer (Ranunculus glacialis) is found in America, 
and the Woodland Caribou has no chance of exhibiting the 
1 Mr. Hind describes the reindeer moss as covering the broken, rocky surface to 
a great depth, and which, when burned off, they found almost impassable on foot. 
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