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has been in the woods more than most gunners or sportsmen, 
tells me that he has seen very little positive evidence of the 
destruction of birds by foxes, although occasionally they kill 
game birds. Mr. William S. Perry of Worcester says that 
foxes kill practically no birds. He has shot a great many 
foxes and examined their stomach contents, as well as those 
of foxes killed by others, and says he has never found the 
remains of a bird in a fox’s stomach. At a recent meeting 
of the Massachusetts Pish and Game Protective Association, 
Mr. A. B. F. Kinney stated that he had examined the stom- 
achs of eighty-five foxes, and found only two quail, one wood- 
cock and one partridge. Mice, frogs, rabbits, berries and 
frozen apples were among the food material found. Mr. H. 
W. Tinkham of Touisset says that in his hunts this year he 
has observed only one case where a bird had been killed by a 
fox; the bird was a crow. Of thirteen fox stomachs he ex- 
amined, only two showed any remains of birds ; and out 
of ninety fox excrements, only one showed birds’ remains. 
The food evidently consisted mainly of mice and other small 
mammals . 1 
This, however, is only negative evidence. There is con- 
vincing, positive evidence of the destructiveness of the fox 
to offer. Mr. C. L. Perkins of Hewburyport, an old sports- 
man, who has killed many foxes, writes : “ Have made it a 
practice, when skinning foxes, to open the stomach, and have 
found, in seasons of bare ground, moles, field-mice, etc. ; but 
when the earth is covered with snow, the stomach will gen- 
erally contain remains of grouse or rabbits. This is no 
doubt due to the habit of the grouse to bury in the snow.” 
Mr. F. B. McKechnie of Ponkapog tells the following : “ In 
May and June of the present year I was at a loss to account 
for the destruction of numbers of birds’ nests found by a 
friend and myself about Ponkapog. Catbirds, song spar- 
rows, thrashers, black-billed cuckoos, oven-birds, redstarts 
and other nests were robbed of their contents with astonish- 
ing rapidity. Bed squirrels and snakes were very scarce in 
the pasture where these nests were found, and after some 
1 The inadequacy of an examination of stomach contents alone to determine the char- 
acter of an animal’s food is seen, when we consider that we get, in this way, evidence of 
only one meal out of all that the animal has eaten during its lifetime. 
