332 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
Nore 2.—In July, 1883, I learned that a dozen or more of 
pigeons had for a long time made their home in an unoccupied hay 
barn on the Bussey Farm, half a mile from the school-building 
above referred to. This barn had been shut up, out of use, for 
several years and there was half a barrel or more of the dry dung 
of the birds in one heap upon the floor. 
It was evident, at the first glance, that this dung differed very 
much as to its composition and general appearance from the dung 
that had been collected on the school-building in previous years. 
A large majority of the separate pieces of the dung from the barn 
consisted well-nigh completely of the husks of oats, manifestly ob- 
tained from horse-dung that had been dropped in the adjacent 
roads; but there were, nevertheless, numerous bits of the dung 
that contained fragments of cherry-stones, and some pieces of the 
dung contained many of these fragments. After a little practice 
it was easy to distinguish almost immediately the cherry-stone dung 
from that composed of oat-husks, so widely did the two kinds differ 
in color and general appearance. It was noticed that the pieces of 
dung charged with broken cherry-stones seemed to be equally © 
abundant in all parts of the heap, 7. e. there were as many of them 
in the dung that appeared to be old as in that which had only 
recently been dropped. There were, moreover, a large number of 
cherry-stone chips in the loose ‘‘ dirt” between the separate pieces 
of dung. A few pieces of dung were encountered that consisted 
almost wholly of cherry-stone chips, though as a rule there were 
comparatively few bits of this dung so highly charged with the 
fragments as the dung on the school-roof had been habitually. It 
was noticeable in this collection from the hay barn that either.one 
or the other of the materials — oat-husks or cherry-stone chips — 
was usually largely predominant over the other in any given piece 
of the dung, though sometimes the two constituents were pretty 
evenly admixed ; and even in those bits where the oat-husks were 
most abundant some fragments of cherry-stones could often be 
detected among the fibres. It was evident from all this that the 
consumption of cherry-stones had not been peculiar to the single 
pair of birds I had previously studied, and that the practice was in 
no wise confined to them. It is manifestly a common habit of 
suburban pigeons in this region to eat cherry-stones, and the fact 
is probably true of pigeons in all localities where this form of food 
is accessible. On August 23, 1883, as I was strolling in the early 
morning on the town hill just behind the village of Provincetown, 
