106 
The Food of Birds. 
February this made three-fourths of the food of eleven 
specimens, and in March more than a third of the food of 
nine. While this larva is not at present injurious, but 
feeds ordinarily on decaying* vegetation, it might possi- 
bly do injury to meadows and pastures if allowed to 
multiply without restraint. 
But few ants are eaten by this bird until late in the 
fall, when the swarming of the sexual forms of some of 
the species seems to attract its appetite, in the relative 
dearth of other insects. 
Caterpillars make up, in March, April and May, fully 
a fourth of its food, about half of these being cutworms 
and other similar forms. Later, these are largely given 
up for fruit, and in the latter half of the season make 
only about one-tentli of the food. The average of cater- 
pillars for the year is seventeen per cent. 
Beetles, commencing at four per cent, in February, 
when but few specimens have yet been aroused from 
their cold winter’s sleep, rise to forty-four per cent, in 
April and May, when their procreative energies are most 
active and urge them out into the air in swarms. TV ith 
the appearance of the small fruits, beetles, also, are neg- 
lected by the robin, and the average for the last four 
months of the season falls away to six per cent., eighteen 
being that for the year. 
This discrimination affects chiefly the scavenger 
beetles and the “June beetles,” the other families main- 
taining about their original numbers throughout, with 
only an upward* wave in April. The predaceous beetles 
average six per cent, of the food of the year, the leaf- 
chafers three per cent., the wi reworms two per cent., and 
the snout-beetles one per cent. 
The robin’s depredations upon the true bugs (Hemip- 
tera) are but trivial, amounting only to three per cent, 
of the food, but nearly all of these belong to species re- 
garded more or less positively as beneficial. 
The ratio of grasshoppers and crickets (four per cent.) 
seems trivial at first sight. We note, however, that these 
were eaten by twenty-six of the birds, and that, conse- 
quently, at least twenty-six of the insects must have been 
destroyed. Remembering that these figures are based 
