The Nighthawk 
3 
stitute the only part where there is much flesh. The legs are small ana 
weak, and do not appear to have much use, as the muscles that move 
them are thin and soft. At one point, however, the Nighthawk’s 
anatomy is fully developed — its stomach is huge for so small a bird, fully 
equaling, or perhaps exceeding, in capacity that of the Pigeon, whose 
body is twice as big. It is right here that the Nighthawk’s usefulness 
appears. This enormous stomach must be kept filled to supply motive 
power for the long wings which are kept in motion so 
many hours. To facilitate this work nature has given Yi^MoutlT 
the bird an enormous mouth, which is really more like 
that of a frog than of a bird, has short bristles, and is merely tipped with 
the minute beak. 
The food consists of insects taken flying, and so greedy is the bird 
that when food is plenty it stuffs its stomach almost to bursting. To 
ascertain the character of the food taken, more than three hundred 
stomachs have been examined by the United States Biological Survey, 
with interesting results. Flying ants constituted a conspicuous part of 
the contents, their remains occurring in a large number of cases, once 
to the amount of 1800! 
While ants may sometimes be useful to us, they are, for the most 
part, annoying and harmful insects ; and it is evident that they would be 
much more numerous than they are were not their ranks so severely 
thinned by the attacks of the Nighthawks. Moreover, these ants are 
killed at the most important epoch of their lives, when they are preparing 
to propagate their kind, so that the death of every female means a loss 
of hundreds, or perhaps of thousands, to the next gen- 
eration. In this work the Nighthawks rank next to, Ants*** 
or even with, the Woodpeckers, the acknowledged ant- 
eaters among northern birds, and thus become rivals of the Flickers. 
Grasshoppers are another important article of the Nighthawk’s diet. 
One stomach contained the remains of 60 of them, probably the refuse 
of several meals, as the jaws of the insects were the principal remains. 
Another stomach contained 38, another 22, and still another, 19; these 
last were mostly entire, and served to show how much the stomach of a 
Nighthawk might hold. 
May-beetles, or June-bugs (Lachnosterna ) , were found in several 
stomachs — one held the remains of 34, another 23, and a third 17. 
The larvae of these beetles are the hated white grubs, one of the worst 
pests of agriculture. They feed upon the roots of grass and other cul- 
tivated plants, ruin lawns, and are often the cause of failure in cropping. 
Other well-known pests destroyed by the Night- 
hawk are the potato-beetle, cucumber-beetle, chestnut, Beetles Eaten 
rice, clover-leaf and cotton-boll weevils, bill-bugs, 
bark-beetles, squash-bugs, and moths of the cotton-worm. Several species 
of mosquitoes, including Anopheles , the transmitter of malaria, are eaten. 
The grain-destroying bugs of the chinch-bug family were found in 
considerable numbers, and also the troublesome leaf-hoppers. Many 
