The Food of Birds. 
107 
upon a single day’s food, or even less, for each bird, we 
see that these robins were eating at an average rate of at 
least twenty-six grasshoppers or crickets a day, for seven 
months, giving us a minimum total of 5,500 Orthoptera 
for the year. 
Only one per cent, of the food was spiders. Thousand- 
legs were eaten by eight of the birds, and by these in 
merely trivial quantity. 
Coming now to the fruits, we find that tame cherries, 
blackberries, raspberries, currants and grapes, excluding 
wild fruit of all descriptions, make about one-fourth of 
the food of the species for the year, the wild fruits mak- 
ing another tenth. In the absence of the latter, the robins 
would doubtless attack the garden fruits more vigor- 
ously.* 
Concerning these general statements, the all-important 
question is, of course, the sufficiency of their basis. 
Granting that the observations have been exactly made 
and correctly generalized, how far may the conclusions 
reached be expected to hold good in the future! These 
conclusions actually rest upon the food of a hundred and 
fourteen birds for probably about half a day each. Can 
we safely reason from these to the food of the thousands 
and hundreds of thousands of robins of the State, day 
after day, the whole season through! 
In a paper published last winter in the Transactions of 
the Illinois Horticultural Society, I made the following 
reply to substantially the same question : 
“If the same species will eat substantially the same 
food, year after year, in the same situation, then, of 
course, a good deal may properly be inferred fiom 
comparatively few data; but if the food varies widely, 
either arbitrarily or under slight changes of condition, 
then we can infer but little. Upon this fundamental 
question I have two suggestions to make. 
“First, if several species allied in structure, occupy- 
ing the same territory at the same time, living side by 
* No man should needlessly sacrifice a wild cherry-tree or a fruiting 1 
vine or shrub of any "kind. Ordinary common sense would teach the 
preservation of as much of the worthless natural food of frugivorous 
birds a<y e- possible, as a diversion from the cultivated fruits of the orchard 
and garden. 
~~~ oXAf 
