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Brewster on the Pine Grosbeak. 
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Ljuly 
more or less widely and generally among all the trees of this 
species in Cambridge. 
The celerity with which the Grosbeaks stripped a large ash, 
laden with crowded clusters of the brownish, pendent fruit, was 
surprising, even when due allowance is made for the great number 
of birds. They distributed themselves pretty evenly over the 
entire tree, although, as already stated, they usually attacked the 
upper branches first. Each bird worked busily and silently and, 
when the fruit was abundant, moved about but little, merely 
bending forward and downward for a seed, and after this had 
been sheared of its wings and eaten, reaching for another in the 
same manner without changing its foothold. I have watched 
over a hundred birds thus engaged for a minute or more without 
hearing a sound save the light crackling rustle of the seeds as 
they were rolled in the powerful bills. 
Next to the ash trees, the Grosbeaks preferred the Norway 
spruces, the terminal buds 'of which they appeared to relish 
greatly. The snow under every spruce of any size in the area 
which the birds invaded was thickly strewn with fragments of 
these buds. Mr. Walter Deane, who made a microscopic examin- 
ation of these small fragments, and also of the branches of the 
trees themselves, found that the birds ate only the nucleus, a 
soft, greenish mass of tissue, scarcely larger than the head of an 
ordinary pin, and lying at the base of the terminal or axillary buds. 
This nucleus may be that of a future branch, cone, or staminate 
blossom. The bird bites or breaks off the bud about midway 
between its extremity and base, and picks out the nucleus, leaving 
its protecting outer scales on the trees. The fragments found 
under the trees consist of the terminal halves of these buds, either 
intact, or broken into their component scales . 1 The fruit of the 
white ash is split along the middle of the flat sides from the base 
well towards the extremity and sometimes into two halves. 
The Grosbeaks, as I have already said, sometimes fed without 
making a sound except the cracking or crunching of their food, 
but usually a low murmuring or whimpering whistle, audible 
'Mr. Deane has published some notes on this subject in the Botanical 
Gazette (Vol. XVIII, No. 4, April, 1893, pp. 143, 144). 
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