CALIFORNIA. THRASHER. 55 
clusive as to the elements of its preferred diet. It is evident that it 
is fond of fruit, and where abundant the bird may become a menace 
to the orchard and vineyard. 
CALIFORNIA THRASHER. 
(Torostoma redivira.) 
Thrashers are eminently birds of the underbrush. While they 
occasionally alight on trees at some height from the ground, they 
are more frequently seen under bushes or skulking out of sight in 
some almost impenetrable thicket of briars. When, however, the 
thrasher wakes in the morning and feels his soul overflowing with 
song, he perches on the topmost twig of a tree and lets the world 
know that he is there and believes that life is worth living. 
The food of the thrasher is obtained on or near the ground. The 
long curved bill of the California species is probably used much as 
many birds use their claws to dig among dead leaves and other rub- 
bish for insects. The bird is not fastidious in its diet, and examina- 
tion of the stomachs reveals a good many bits of dead leaves, rotten 
wood, plant stems, which are carelessly taken along with more 
nutritious morsels. 
An examination of 82 stomachs of this species shows that vegetable 
food exceeds the animal in the proportion of 59 to 41. In the eastern 
species (7. rufum) the ratio is 36 to 64. This result is rather sur- 
prising, for, as a general rule, California birds eat a larger propor- 
tion of animal food than do the most nearly related eastern species. 
Animal food—As the thrasher is eminently a ground forager it 
would naturally be expected to find and eat many ground-living bee- 
tles. Of these the Carabide are the most important, owing to their 
predaceous habits; so a separate account of this family was kept. 
The result shows that they enter the food of the thrasher to the extent 
only of 3.8 percent, while all other beetles amount to nearly 6 percent. 
Of these, the darkling beetles (Tenebrionide) are the most numerous, 
and the May beetles (Scarabeide) next. But very few weevils or other 
species that live on trees or foliage were found. Of all the insects, 
Hymenoptera are the most abundant, as they are also the most con- 
stant element of the thrasher’s food. About half of these are ants, 
the rest wasps and bees. Ants naturally are the insects most often 
found by this bird, as many species live on the ground and among 
rubbish and rotten wood. The occurrence in the food of wasps and 
bees, on the contrary, is somewhat of a surprise, as they are mostly 
sun-loving insects more often found on flowers or the leaves of trees 
than under bushes or thickets where the thrasher delights to forage. 
Together they make up something more than 12 percent of the food 
