without any aid from crows. Whenever stock was fed with grain they were always on hand to get their portion. They ate corn with the pigs in the hog lot, and often outnumbered the little chickens in the back yard around their rations of cracked corn or Indian mush. Not satisfied with regular feeding times, they drew on the source of supply, the corn house, and could be seen any day in the year, but most commonly in winter, flying out of it, sometimes by the score.

Other birds. So far as is known, no other birds of the farm committed serious depredations on grain, though several occasionally did trifling harm. The red-winged blackbird did not disturb sprouting grain, but was seen in the first week of August, 1898, to visit cornfields in flocks of from 12 to 20 and eat from roasting ears. Goldfinches were troublesome in ripening oats on the Hungerford farm during the last week of June, 1899. A flock of a hundred spent most of the day swaying on bending oat stems. Four were collected, but singularly enough no grain was in their stomachs. On an acre of the field where the birds usually assembled, 5 percent of the crop was lost from the breaking down of stalks.

If the mourning dove and the bobwhite do harm to grain it is so slight as to escape notice. The dove, however, has been taken with a few kernels of sprouting wheat in its crop." Both birds eat a good deal of waste grain in stubble-fields. On August 31, 1898, in lot 4, there was a flock of at least 30 doves in the wheat stubble of the Bryan farm, and at the same time there were two smaller flocks on the Hungerford place. In November, 1899, the flock on the upper part of the farm fed with the bobwhites on wheat stubble, and, like them, did not appear to relish corn dropped from the ear in fields where they were searching for weed seed. There was considerable diversity of feeding habits among different flocks of bobwhites on the two farms. One flock on the Bryan farm during November and December, 1900, was seldom seen on a patch of wheat stubble adjacent to their cover, the oak woods of lot 5. Hawks were numerous there, however, and may have frightened the birds away from what would ordinarily have been a tempting feeding ground. A large covey on the lower part of the Hungerford farm, where no wheat had been raised, fed entirely on weed seed, but one at the upper end spent about all the feeding time in wheat stubble. This covey had a habit of sleeping in a peach orchard, as was attested by little rings of dung showing where the birds had squatted in a circle with heads out and tails in. From six of these rings, representing as many days' feeding, 300 droppings were collected. Remains of wheat, or more strictly speaking, fragments of bran from one-fifth of a millimeter to 5 millimeters in length, formed 85 percent of them. A bird of this covey had in its crop 160 whole

@ In Essex County, N. J., the dove does much damage in newly sown fields of buckwheat.

grains, and in its stomach other wheat half digested, all amounting to 91 percent of its food. The next year bobwhites were noted feeding in wheat stubble in lot 3 (Pl. XII, fig. 2). In November, 1900, observations were made in a cornfield in which the tops of the stalks had been removed for fodder, leaving the ears attached to low stalks. In many places kernels had dropped to the ground, but the bobwhites that frequented the field to procure weed seed apparently did not touch them. These desultory data would seem to indicate that the bobwhite takes only waste wheat and does not relish corn, but observations made in November, 1901, on lot 5 of the Bryan farm, when the corn was in the stack (Pl. XII, fig. 1), does not confirm this supposition; for in this case the birds fed to a certain extent on the waste kernels of corn scattered on the ground.

The meadowlark is much less granivorous than these two species, but it often picked up wheat in stubble-fields just after harvest and late in the fall. One specimen obtained November 29, 1900, contained 70 percent of wheat. The cardinal was occasionally seen feeding on waste wheat and corn along the edge of stubble-fields. The English sparrow, the crow, the crow blackbird, the red-wing, and the cowbird are also stubble feeders. On the 5th of August, 1898, fully a thousand crow blackbirds with a few redwings were noted picking up waste grain in the wheat and oat stubble of the Hungerford farm. If such a horde of these birds were present at harvest time, complaints would be made against them as serious as those now heard from the Mississippi Valley.

During the blizzard of February, 1900, several birds obtained food from the droppings of farm animals. English sparrows and crows were seen picking corn from dung in the hog pen on the Hungerford farm, and meadowlarks, horned larks, doves, and cardinals were noticed taking it from cow droppings in an open pasture.

The native sparrows, unlike the English sparrows, have little or no liking for grain. In a field of wheat on the Bryan farm 5 English sparrows and 19 native sparrows, including song, field, chipping, and grasshopper sparrows, were collected, just before and just after the crop was cut. All the English sparrows were gorged with wheat, but only 2 native sparrows --a chipping sparrow and a grasshopper sparrow-had eaten it, and they had taken only a single kernel apiece. Moreover, when winter wheat sprouted, the hosts of native sparrows from the North that were running over the fields could not be detected doing it any injury.

VI. WEED SEED.

Weed seed is a staple article of diet for practically all seed-eating birds. It formed 18 percent of the food of the whole number of birds collected, and had been eaten by 162. Lists of these birds and of the 41 kinds of seeds that they selected are appended.

Amaranth (Amaranthus retroflexus, fig. Lamb's-quarters (Chenopodium album, fig.

WEED DESTRUCTION BY NATIVE SPARROWS.

Spring. The farmer's strongest allies in his campaign against weeds are the various species of native sparrows (Pl. XIII), which are a potent aid every month in the year, though chiefly in the colder months. The value of their work, obvious in fall and winter, is less easily appraised in spring and early summer, but may be suggested by a few notes.

The sparrows that breed on the farm have to content themselves early in the spring with seeds left from the preceding year, but by the middle of May they find in fields that have lain fallow all winter, or that were in corn the previous season, a plentiful supply of the ripening seeds of chickweed and, a little later, of yellow sorrel. Song sparrows were seen (May 18, 1899) on the edges of such fields helping themselves liberally from opening chickweed pods. Chipping sparrows were noted (May 30, 1896) far out in a patch of corn stubble feeding on yellow sorrel that was going to seed, and a chipping sparrow and a field sparrow collected June 16 and 17, 1898, had eaten seeds of the same weed.

Summer. During the second week in July, 1898, a song sparrow was often seen following lines of knotweed in the road along the bluff, and a telescope showed that it was plucking off the newly ripened seeds. At the same time another song sparrow, killed on the edge of a timothy field, and two grasshopper sparrows from the center of the same field, had eaten seeds of rib-grass, which at the time was a bad weed in the timothy. During August the seed-eating of sparrows is sufficiently noticeable to attract the attention of even a casual observer, for by this time great stores of weed seed have ripened and the young sparrows, which have been exclusively insectivorous, are ready to take vegetable food. The following notes merely give a few specific cases that might have been multiplied many times every day. A song sparrow was observed (August 28, 1898) picking out soft immature seeds from a spike of green fox-tail grass, a plant that, with its congener pigeon-grass, furnishes seed-eating birds with favorite food. On the same date a score of chipping sparrows were noted amid crabgrass, which was spreading so rapidly through a market garden in a pear orchard on the Bryan place that it was likely to impair the product. They hopped up to the fruiting stalks, which were then in the milk, and beginning at the tip of one of the several spikes that radiated from a common center like the spokes of a wheel and, gradually moving their beaks along to the base, they chewed off the seeds of spike after spike in regular succession. Usually they did not remove their beaks until they reached the base, though some individuals, especially birds of the year, would munch a few seeds in the middle of a spike and then take a fresh one. Fourteen birds were col

1, Juneo; 2, white-throated sparrow: 3, fox sparrow; 4, tree sparrow.

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