2 5 0 
Brewster on the Pine Grosbeak. 
r Auk 
L July 
confusion. Sometimes these alarms had no obvious cause. The 
larger the flocks the oftener they occurred. The great flock 
at the two ash trees started, on an average, once a minute. 
Loud, Continuous sounds did not seem to excite them, and they 
were quite as indifferent as the House Sparrows feeding with 
them, to the near passage of horse cars, sleighs, and the other 
traffic of the busy street. 
A flock of about a dozen Grosbeaks fed for a day or two in 
a flowering apple ( P parkmanni ) growing in our garden. This 
tree is only five or six feet high. Its apples, which are scarcely 
larger than large currants, cling to the twigs all winter and had 
never been previously eaten by any birds except Waxwings 
(■ Ampelis cedrorum). There had been an unusually large crop 
in 1892, and the branches of the little tree were literally crowded 
with the tiny fruit. The Grosbeaks did not eat the pulp, except 
perhaps incidentally, in small quantities, but crushing the apples 
they squeezed out the large seeds, of which each fruit usually 
contains two, and swallowed these. The pulp was dropped, or 
when, as was frequently the case, it adhered to the bill, shaken 
off, or removed by rubbing the bill against a twig. As a rule 
the apple was bitten off a little below the stem so that its 
basal portion with the long stem remained attached to the tree. 
House-sparrows, who had never before molested the apples, 
gathered when the Grosbeaks began their raid and watched 
them. By the end of the first day I saw several Sparrows crush- 
ing the fruit between their mandibles exactly in the manner of 
the Grosbeaks, but I think they ate the pulp as well as the seeds. 
They afterward finished what the Grosbeaks had left. 
I snared several of the Grosbeaks which frequented this tree, 
using two joints of a light fly rod and a running noose of twine. 
It was not always an easy task, for the wind blew the noose 
about, and the birds seldom remained perfectly still for more 
than a second or two at a time, although they showed not the 
slightest suspicion or nervousness, allowing the coarse brown 
twine to rub against their bills and the end of the pole to strike 
their crowns without, at the most, doing more than to push the 
noose aside, or to bend their heads to avoid the pole. I actually 
caught one without alarming the rest of the flock, but usually the 
t 
