does for us so cheerfully. He eats beetles, grubs, worms, caterpillars, spiders, snails, grasshoppers, wild grapes, blue-berries, service berries, choke berries, black alder and holly-berries, rose hips and the seeds of sumac.
SWALLOW
There were always dead birds for the doctor to study. Woeful little tragedies happened in the nests. Once, a pretty mother oriole was hanged by a loop of horse hair, in a nest she was weaving. For hours the mate made wild lament for his loss. Then, a high wind tumbled the half-finished nest and the dead weaver to the ground. Nothing but insects were in the little stomach—beetles, ants, wasps, spiders, bark scales, plant lice and caterpillars. In midsummer the oriole eats a few grapes and peas. Can't we spare her those for the countless insects she eats and feeds to her babies?
A barn-swallow, hurt in some way on its northward flight, had fed on cotton-boll weevil, in flying over the young cotton plants in the south. And she had eaten flies, mosquitoes, gnats and little wasps, and in her stomach were the broken wings of the gad-fly that stings horses. The doctor put more brackets under the eaves of the barn, on which these little friends of barnyard animals could brace their nests.
CHICKADEE
For the house-wrens and bluebirds the doctor put up box nests. For the phoebes he had a grape-arbor and a vine-draped porch. For the chickadees he planted a thick hedge; for the brown thrush and song-sparrow low-growing shrubs. There was a mulberry tree for the orchard birds to feed upon, a cedar tree for wax-wing. And along the pasture he let the elderberry bushes, wild blackberry briars and briar roses grow, for the fruit. There were sumac bushes, too, and alder saplings, a choke cherry and other wild fruit and seed-making trees. For years and years he kept on telling his neighbors that nearly all of our wild birds are insect, wild fruit and weed seed eaters.
