494 GAME BIRDS, WILD-FOWL AND SHORE BIRDS. 



he will destroy the eggs or the young birds if he finds them. 

 The young are very weak when first hatched and will hardly 

 survive a good wetting; Audubon says that when the young 

 have become chilled and ill the female feeds them the buds of 

 the spicebush {Benzoin benzoin); but, however she manages, 

 she often succeeds in rearing the brood. The fox and lynx are 

 among her most dangerous enemies at this time, but later, 

 when the young birds have learned to fly and to roost in the 

 trees, the Great Horned Owl takes its toll from their numbers. 



The Wild Turkey adapts itself to circumstances in regard 

 to food, eating acorns, berries, buds, weed seeds, grass seeds 

 and other vegetable food. It is also fond of grain, and 

 this no doubt led to its extirpation in Massachusetts. The 

 gunners watched in the cornfields, or laid long lines of corn in 

 ditches, where they could rake the whole flock, or baited the 

 birds into pens, in which whole broods were captured. But 

 the birds, both young and old, often are useful to the farmer, 

 for they are very fond of insects, particularly grasshoppers. 

 Dr. Judd makes an excellent contribution to the literature on 

 the food habits of the Wild Turkey, including an examination 

 of sixteen stomachs and crops of Turkeys, made by the Biolog- 

 ical Survey. These contained 15.57 per cent, of animal mat- 

 ter and 84.43 per cent, of vegetable matter. The animal 

 food comprises insects, 15.15 per cent.; miscellaneous inver- 

 tebrates (spiders, snails and myriapods), .42 per cent. Of 

 the animal food, 13.92 per cent, consisted of grasshoppers. 

 Beetles, flies, caterpillars and other insects made up the 

 residue of 1.23 per cent. The list of animal and vegetable 

 food as given by Dr. Judd is favorable to the Turkey, as it 

 contains insect pests, wild berries and no vegetable food of 

 value to mankind. '^ 



The varied food of this bird gives it the finest flavor of 

 any fowl that I have ever tasted, and its great size and beauty 

 contribute to make it, to my mind, the noblest game bird in 

 the world. It is destined to vanish forever from the earth 

 unless our people begin at once to protect it. 



1 Judd, Sylvester D.: The Grouse and Wild Turkeys of the United States and their Economic 

 Value, Bulletin 24, Bureau of Biol. Surv., U. S. Dept. of Agr., pp. 49, 50. 



