The Food of Birds. 
131 
beetles and plant-beetles call for no special remark. 
Hemiptera now make one-tentli of the food — an excep- 
tional occurrence due to the. fact that this was one of the 
chinch-hug years in central Illinois and that three of 
these birds had eaten freely of that insect. Orthoptera 
stand at six per cent., about equally distributed between 
the three families of the crickets, locusts and grasshop- 
pers. A specimen of Tridactylus was noticed among the 
first and one of the common katydids among the 
second. The fruits of this month amount to thirty per 
cent., eaten by nine of the birds. Half of these were cher- 
ries, and the remainder were blackberries, grapes, elder- 
berries, and the berries of the mountain-ash. Fragments 
of corn amounted to eighteen per cent, of the food. 
September. 
But two birds were shot in September, too few to give 
any correct idea of the food of the month. It is only nec- 
essary to say that these had eaten more largely of grass- 
hoppers than the birds of the preceding month, and to 
about the same extent of fruits, all of which were grapes. 
Summary for the Year. 
Taking the food of the year together, we find that al- 
most precisely one-half of it consisted of insects. Spiders 
amounted to but one per cent, and thousand-legs to but 
three. The remainder of the food consisted equally of the 
smaller garden fruits and the fragments of seeds and 
grain. Thirteen per cent, of the food of these sixty-four 
birds consisted of blackberries, four per cent, of raspber- 
ries, one per cent, of strawberries and three per cent, of 
cherries. The ants of the year stand at seven per cent., 
caterpillars at six, and Diptera at only one. Coleoptera 
amounted to precisely one-fourth of the food, predaceous 
beetles to six per cent, and Scarabseidse to thirteen per 
cent., nearly all of these being leaf-chafers. Spring- 
beetles and snout-beetles each average two per cent., and 
Hemiptera and Orthoptera each stand at four. 
In the paper previously cited, published in the Trans- 
actions of the Illinois Horticultural Society for 1879, I 
