Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 303, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 December 1915 — BIRDS’ HOLIDAY DAINTIES [ARTICLE]

BIRDS’ HOLIDAY DAINTIES

Yellow-Leg Snipe Travels Some 9,000 Miles for Christmas Dinner — Robins Like Holly Berries. The yellow-leg snipe travels a matter of 9,000 miles to get his Christmas dinner. It is pretty nearly the longest journey made annually by any living creature, and the object of it seems to be to procure certain dainties in the way of aquatic insects and crustaceans appropriate for holiday fare. * 4 One might say, however, that the most appropriate of Christmas dinners is eaten by the robins which at this holiday season feed largely upon the berries of the holly—particularly upon the berries of a kind of holly called the black alder, which are as bitter as qdinine.

Another bird which has an interesting Christmas is the mocking bird. He is a planter of the mistletoe berries and mistletoe berries contribute largely to his Christmas dinner. Being particularly fond of them he incidentally, though without intention, carries the seeds to tree branches where they promptly fasten themselves and sprout In, this way the parasitic plant is widely propagated in Texas, which is the principal winter resort of the mockers. The canvasback duck breeds in the far North, from Minnesota to the Arctic circle, in the interior. But the call of Christmas turns it southward, and it spends the holidays along the southern Atlantic coast, from the Chesapeake to Cuba. It feeds on various aquatic plants, but the piece de resistance of its Christmas dinners is wild celery—a succulent, water vegetable which gives to its flesh a flavor highly appreciated by the epicure. The wild Canada goose goes all the way to Mexico in winter, spending Christmas among the lakes in that far southern latitude, where nutritious grasses and water plants are plentiful.