The Food of Birds. 
105 
delius. No trace of spiders or myriapods was found, and 
only two per cent, of grasshoppers. The fruits stand at 
seventy per cent., fifty-two per cent, being grapes and 
the remainder berries of the mountain-ash and moonseed 
( Menispermum) . 
October and December. 
The robin commences to withdraw to the south in Octo- 
ber, and his operations in central Illinois have little in- 
terest during this month. At Normal the species became 
rare earlier than usual this year, and but three speci- 
mens were secured. These were feeding largely on wild 
grapes (fifty-three per cent.) and ants (thirty-five per 
cent.). Six per cent, of the food was caterpillars and 
two per cent, wireworms (Elateridae). I have seen the 
bird eating apples in all the autumn months, but have 
never found the remains of this fruit in the stomach, and 
doubt if any special harm is done in this way. 
A single bird shot at Cairo in December, piping loudly 
from a tree-top for company, the only one of the entire 
family seen during a week’s winter shooting in southern 
Illinois, had evidently been feeding on the berries of the 
mistletoe. By the inhabitants of that region, troops of 
robins which commonly winter there were said to have 
gone south in November, a fact attributed by them to the 
failure of the wild grapes in the woods that year. 
Recapitulation. 
The food of the robin, as indicated by the stomachs of 
one hundred and fourteen specimens, consists almost en- 
tirely of insects from February to May inclusive, but 
from that time forward these make but little over a third 
of its food, the remainder (sixty-four per cent.) being 
composed of fruits, tame and wild, in varying propor- 
tions, according to the local situation and surroundings. 
Insects make almost precisely two-thirds of the food of 
the year, taken as a whole. 
In early spring the bird depends chiefly for food upon 
the larvae of a single species of fly ( Bibio albipennis, 
Say), which it jacks from among the leaves and roots of 
grass and weeds in gardens, and similar situations. In 
