270 CONNECTICUT GEOL. AND NAT. HIST. SURVEY. [Bull. 



ragweed akenes; another, killed the previous November in the 

 same place, had eaten an equal number of the seeds of crabgrass, 

 a troublesome weed in truck land. Birds have been shot in 

 Mecklenburg County, Va., whose stomachs contained 3,000 

 leguminous seeds, mostly of tick trefoil and various species of 

 bush clover. Pigeon grass, which is extremely common and mis- 

 chievous in truck land, is a favorite food. No less than 5,000 

 seeds of this troublesome plant were found in the stomach of a 

 bird shot in October, 1902, at Pinebrook, N. J. Finally, a Bob- 

 white taken on Christmas Day, 1901, at Kinsale, Va., was 

 discovered to have eaten 10,000 seeds of that abundant and ob- 

 noxious pest of the garden, the pigweed. 



^ " A careful computation of the total amount of weed seed the 

 Bob-white is capable of destroying is surprising in the magnitude 

 of its result. In the state of Virginia it is safe to assume that 

 from September i to 30, the season when the largest proportion 

 of weed seed is consumed by birds, there are four Bob-whites 

 to the square mile, or 169,800 in the entire state. The crop of 

 each of these birds will hold half an ounce of seed ; and, as at 

 each of the two daily meals weed seed constitutes at least half 

 the contents of the crop, or a quarter of an ounce, a half-ounce 

 daily is certainly consumed by each bird. On this very conserva- 

 tive basis the total consumption of weed seed by Bob-whites from 

 September i to April 30 in Virginia amounts to 573 tons. 



" The Bob-white is insectivorous as well as granivorous. In- 

 sects are eaten during every month of the year, and amount to 

 14.93 per cent of the food for the year as a whole. From May 

 to August, inclusive, when insects are most numerous, the per- 

 centage for the period rises to 31.5 per cent. The variety of 

 insect food is large. In the present investigation 116 species of 

 insects have been noted as entering into the diet, a number that 

 will probably be greatly augmented by further knowledge. Fur- 

 thermore, the proportion of injurious insects habitually eaten by 

 the Bob-white makes its service as a destroyer of insects more 

 valuable than .those of many birds whose percentage of insect 

 food, though greater, includes a smaller proportion of injurious 

 species. Conspicuous among the pests which the Bob-white 

 destroys are the potato beetle, the 12-spotted cucumber beetle, 

 the bean leaf-beetle, the squash ladybird, wireworms and their 



