52 THE RELATION 0* SPABBOWS TO AGRICULITRE. 
Little information can be given concerning the summer food of the 
bird. It is said to feed <>n t he seeds of shore or marsh plants, and 
on aquatic Invertebrates, Including small crustaceans and mollusks. 
Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway state thai the adult birds feed exten- 
sively during .May on the buds of Saxtfraga oppositifolia, thai they 
hunt on the houses of Greenlanders for insecl larvra, and that a cap- 
tive bird showed a Liking for cracked corn and wheat.' In an article 
on the birds of the Pribilof Islands, by .Mr. William Palmer, 2 there 
is ;i brief note on the habits of the Pribilof snowflake {Passerina 
nivalis townsi ndi), which are probably similar to those of I he common 
snowflake (Passerina nivalis). Mr. rainier submitted to me for 
examination the stomach contents of two old birds and five young 
ones secured on St. Paul Island. Everyone had eaten either larval 
or adult (lies, belonging principally to the families Chironomidffl 
and Tipulidse. Some of the birds had been feeding on maggots, 
which they had doubtless obtained from the decaying carcasses of 
fur seals, at thai time numerous on the island. One of the adult 
birds had eaten a small green leaf-beetle of the family ChrysomelidsB, 
and one of the young birds had eaten a spider. The only vegetable 
matter found was in the stomachs of two of the young birds, in one 
case consisting of a few fragments of grass, and in the other of 40 
unidentified boat-shaped yellow seeds. Two of the young birds had 
swallowed little fragments of the volcanic lava of which St. Paul 
Island is composed. Mr. Palmer saw a parent snowflake make 
repeated trips to the shore of an inland Lagoon for the purpose of 
securing for her young a supply of dead sand fleas (amphipods of 
the subfamily Gamarini). 
Forty-six stomachs of snowflakes, collected from January to April, 
inclusive, mainly in Ontario, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York, 
have been examined. From these examinations it appears that at 
this lime of the year the birds are grea1 consumers of weed seed, but 
that they also eat considerable grain. Professor Aughey slates that 
in Nebraska they are accustomed to t'ovd on the eggs of the Rocky 
.Mountain locust during the winter; 8 but the stomachs exam i net 1 in the 
laboratory of the Biological Survey contained nothing but vegetable 
matter. One-third of this was grain, while almost the whole of the 
remainder consisted of weed seed. Grain constituted 96 percent of 
the contents of the ! :] stomachs collected in April, but this large per- 
centage arises from the fact that all the April collections were made 
on the same day w hen the birds happened to be feeding on oats. Had 
these same birds been collected a few days earlier or later, they 
mighl have been feeding almost entirely on weed seed, which would, 
i. North American birds. Vol.1, p, 518, L874. 
1 Fur Seals and Pur-Seal Islands, Part 8, p. 124, L890. 
t Ann. Report U. S. Entomological Commission, App. II, p. 2\), 1S78. 
