INSECT FOOD. 23 



seldom lasts more than a week or two. Soon the dead bodies of the 

 short-lived creatures are cast up all along- the shore in windrows several 

 inches high, and then there is a marked decrease in their abundance 

 about the farm. They occur, however, though in constantly dimin- 

 ishing numbers, throughout June and even into July. 



At their flood tide they furnish most of the food of practically all 

 the birds of the farm, even including barnyard fowls. They are soft, 

 entirely edible, and highly nutritious, owing to the fact that the 

 females are heavy with eggs. Any bird, no matter how clumsy, can 

 capture them as they make their aimless, blundering flights, or fall 

 helplessly from contact with objects in their way. It was interesting 

 to see the methods by which different birds procured them. A green 

 heron, three spotted sandpipers, several song sparrows, and a dozen 

 crow blackbirds frequented the beach, picking up insect after insect. 

 Woodpeckers and at times Carolina chickadees snapped them up from 

 tree trunks in the apple orchard or the hog-lot gully. The parula 

 warbler, the yellow warbler, and one or two other warblers, with the 

 white-eyed vireo and the red-eyed vireo, gathered them from among 

 leafy boughs. The redstart darted out and caught its share of the 

 quarry on the wing. Some spiecies fed in a lazy, sated manner. Thus 

 in the top of a cedar that was gra}^ with the insects, Ave crows sat for 

 half an hour slowly choking them down. A pair of red-winged black- 

 birds and several blackpoll warblers later visited the same tree to feed. 

 Such flycatchers as the phoebe, the wood pewee, the kingbird, and the 

 great crested flycatcher stood nervously at their sentry posts, every 

 now and then rising to hover and snap up a victim. The kingbird 

 had another, more interesting method of feeding. Perched in the dead 

 top of a tree, it would make a dash into one of the lateral boughs of 

 an adjacent locust that was so heavily laden with May-flies that the tips 

 of the branchlets drooped under the weight, dislodge hundreds of 

 the insects, snap up several as they fluttered out, and then return to 

 its perch. Over and over it played this game, apparently with keen 

 zest. I watched a similar, though less adroit, performance by a 

 female catbird that spent a long time gathering food for her young 

 from a maple in the dooryard. Every few minutes she would take a 

 short flight and drop on the end of a slender bough; then from the 

 scores of May-flies shaken out she would, by clumsy efforts, generally 

 manage to catch one. A hen with her brood of eleven chicks derived 

 the chief profit from the bird's industry, and remained for two hours 

 gobbling up the manna that rained from the maple tree. English 

 sparrows also shook the insects from the branches and captured them 

 on the wing. A flock of a dozen cedar birds pursued them through 

 the air, appearing to swim rather than fly, and reminding one of a 

 lazy sunfish dawdling after a baited hook. At other times, possibly 

 when they were more hungry, they caught their prey with an alert- 



