52 THE EELATION OF SPAREOWS TO AaRlOULTURE. 



Little information can be given concerning the summer food of tlie 

 bird. It is said to feed on the seeds of shore or marsh plants, and 

 on aquatic invertebrates, including small crustaceans and mollusks. 

 Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway state that the adult birds feed exten- 

 sively during May on the buds of Saxifraga oppositifoUa, that they 

 hunt on the houses of Greenlanders for insect larvse, and that a cap- 

 tive bird showed a liking for cracked corn and wheat. ^ In an article 

 on the birds of the Pribilof Islands, by Mr. William Palmer,^ there 

 is a brief note on the habits of the Pribilof snowflake [Passerina 

 nivalis toiunseiidi), which are probably similar to those of the common 

 snowflake {Passerina nivalis). Mr. Palmer submitted to me for 

 examination the stomach contents of two old birds and five young- 

 ones secured on St. Paul Island. Ever}^ one had eaten either larval 

 or adult flies, belonging principally to the families Chironomidaj 

 and Tipulidge. Some of the birds had been feeding on maggots, 

 which they had doubtless obtained from the decajdng carcasses of 

 fur seals, at that time numerous on the island. One of the adult 

 birds had eaten a small green leaf-beetle of the famih" Chrysomelidse, 

 and one of the young birds had eaten a spider. The only vegetable 

 matter found was in the stomachs of two of the 3"0ung birds, in one 

 case consisting of a few fragments of grass, and in the other of 40 

 unidentified boat-shaped yellow seeds. Two of the young birds had 

 swallowed little fragments of the volcanic lava of which St. Paul 

 Island is composed. Mr. Palmer saw a parent snowflake make 

 repeated trips to the shore of an inland lagoon for the purpose of 

 securing for her j'oung a supply of dead sand fleas (amphipods of 

 the subfamily Gamarini). 



Forty-six stomachs of snowflakes, collected from January to April, 

 inclusive, mainly in Ontario, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York, 

 have been examined. From these examinations it appears that at 

 this time of the year the birds are great consumers of weed seed, but 

 that they also eat considerable grain. Professor Aughe}^ states that 

 in Nebraska they are accustomed to feed on the eggs of the Rocky 

 Mountain locust during the winter;^ but the stomachs examined in the 

 laboratory of the Biological Survey contained nothing but vegetable 

 matter. One-third of this was grain, while almost the whole of the 

 remainder consisted of weed seed. Grain constituted 96 percent of 

 the contents of the 13 stomachs collected in April, but this large per- 

 centage arises from the fact that all the April collections were made 

 on the same day when the birds happened to be feeding on oats. Had 

 these same birds been collected a few days earlier or later, they 

 might have been feeding almost entirely on weed seed, which would, 



1 Hist. North American Birds, Vol. I, p. 513, 1874. 



2 Fur Seals and Fur-Seal Islands, Part 3, p. 424, 1899. 



2 First Ann. Report U. S. Entomological Commission, App. II, p. 29, 1878. 



