Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 180, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1915 — The Greedy Birds [ARTICLE]

The Greedy Birds

Birdß are busy creatures, for all they find so much time to sing, and they pay a great deal more attention to their stomachs than the poets ever mention. You will come closer to the facts in those government bulletins which report the finding of two thousand mosquitos in the stomach of a single marten, and similar interesting discoveries, than in the poet’s pages. I don’t know that I have ever seen it computed how many raspberries a catbird can eat, but I know it is more than I care to spare from the vines in my own garden, where a pair of catbirds who nest each year in red-osier dogwood beneath my study window love to feed. Out in our abandoned clearing, however, I do not begrudge them the berries, which grow in a comer where the farmer made his last cutting of timber. Many a time I have lain on the ground on the slope in fruiting season and watched a catbird darting back and forth to these vines, as If his appetite was Insatiable, his trim gun-metal body taking the sun on head or wing-tip. Presently I would get up and stroll over to gather some berries for myself. You would have thought a band of human pickers had been there, to see all the whitish, thimble-shaped hulls hanging denuded from their stems. Even as I would put out my hand for a red fruit there would come from the thicket close by a mew of protest and an angry flutter of wings. Though, ip my own experience, the catbirds are most addicted to raspberries, the thrushes, orioles, robins, flickers and cedar waxwings also eat them, and doubtless other birds besides.— Harper’s Magaxine.