Birds 
eating 
suet 
Blue Jays 
prefer 
bread 
J x jt{ ft 
Vji 
showed me this bird the following day. It had a broken wing 
but showed no other signs of injury. It had a House Mouse 
in its throat, the tail and hind feet of this animal pro¬ 
truding just a little beyond the edges of the tightly closed 
bill. It is a mystery how the bird could have met its fate. 
Miss Keyes is feeding the birds this winter as usual 
and she had a fine lot of them,to show me. There were three 
Nuthatches ( carolinensis ), four Downy Woodpeckers, six 
Chickadees, four Blue Jays (six have been seen together on 
one or two occasions), besides, I am sorry to add, a flock 
of at least thirty English Sparrows. The Nuthatches, 
Chickadees and Woodpeckers feed exclusively on suet, a 
large piece of which is kept hanging in the mountain ash 
in front of the dining-room window. The Woodpeckers helped 
themselves first and until they had satisfied their 
appetites the smaller birds had to wait. In no instance did 
I see more than one bird of any kind on the suet at one tim$, 
even the social and amiable little Chickadees taking their 
breakfast by turns. The Sparrows ate bread and suet indis¬ 
criminately but the Jays, strange to say, rarely touched 
anything but the bread and this, Miss Keyes tells me, has 
been the case ever since she first attracted them to the house 
three,or four years ago. I watched them for an hour or two 
only 
both mornings and/once saw one of them attack the suet, but 
he helped himself liberally. 
n 
