CHAPTER IX.. At Meal-Time.

AT MEAL-TIME.

If we had twenty birds in a cage and had to hunt for all the food they could eat, the same as they would do if they were free, we should have a busy time of it, and very likely the birds would starve.

Birds have sharp eyes. Watch the finches and see how they hop from twig to twig, pecking at tiny things which we cannot even see. These birds seem to be near-sighted, finding their dinner right under their eyes. We could not possibly see anything so near our faces.

Then there are some of the birds who seem far-sighted, seeing food at a longer distance than we could, and darting for it as quick as a flash.

It is a fact that most birds are both near-sighted and far-sighted. Their eyes are both telescopes and microscopes. Watch Madam Mocker or Mrs. Robin. She will see a grasshopper on the other side of the lawn, or a daddy-long-legs taking a sun-bath at the far end of the picket fence. The grasshopper and the daddy haven't time to get up and be off before they are surprised by Madam Bird's sharp bill.

Birds, like other people, must work if they will eat, and so they go in search of the cupboard or the cellar, and it is sometimes hard work to find them. The cupboard is anywhere in a dry place, and the door is never locked. The cellar is almost anywhere, too, where it is cool and damp, under the grass and chips and down in cracks between logs and boards. The food in the cellar is very unlike the food in the cupboard.

There are some insects that never see the light and cannot bear the sunshine. They are usually soft, tender things, and live where it is moist and cool. We call these the food in the bird's cellar. There are other insects that love the dry air, where it is warm, the bark of trees and the hot sand, and these we call the food in the bird's cupboard.

Birds spend nearly all their time in hunting for something to eat. Life seems to be one long picnic for them. They digest rapidly. Their food is found and picked up in very small quantities, excepting the food of the gourmands like the buzzards. These birds are certainly not very tidy or nice about their meals. They eat as much as they possibly can, and then sit about on the low fences, or even on the ground, too full and heavy to fly away.

Birds have sharp ears and can hear bugs and worms long before they can be seen. The woodpecker listens for the grubs with his ear close to the bark of the trees. But woodpeckers are not always after grubs when you see them running up and down a tree trunk and pecking holes in the bark. They like the inner skin of the bark for food, and the sap-suckers drink the sap of the tree.

Watch the robin or the mocking-bird on the lawn. You have been sprinkling that lawn for two weeks in midsummer, just to make the grass nice and green. Perhaps you did not think that you were making it easy for the birds to get something to eat in a dry time. But you see that your sprinkling or watering has made the turf mellow and soft, so that the worms can crawl up to the surface more easily than if it were dry. And the birds are making the most of your kindness, as you see.

See how that little bird cants his head and listens. We imagine him holding up his hand and saying, "Don't move, please, nor do anything to scare this worm away. I hear it coming up to the top of the ground, and I am very hungry."

Once we saw a very funny sight. A mocking-bird in the yard had grown very tame and had nested close by, taking no pains to fly away from us. She soon came to know that we had something for her to eat when we called, "Come, Chickie," and she would fly close to us with eager eyes, not at all afraid.

Every night at sundown, which is the bird's supper-time, we went to the summer-house and turned over the empty flower-pots. Under these pots little black bugs were hiding, but more especially the saw-bugs, soft, gray, crawling things. The mocking-bird would follow us as fast as she could, picking up the bugs for her young. When she had a mouth full of the wriggling insects, she would go and feed them to her babies and come back again to the moist places under the pots, until every bug was captured.

Once there were more bugs under one pot than she could possibly carry at one time, and she was in great trouble to know what to do about it. She swallowed as many as she wanted herself, and then she began cramming her mouth full for the babies. The bugs looked so tempting, and there were so many, she did not like to lose any of them, and so she kept on picking them up. After her mouth was as full as it could hold, the bugs kept falling out at the sides of her bill, and she would pick them up again over and over without knowing it, until we scared her away by our laughing.

Some birds, as we have said, such as the owls, take their food whole. Of course, bones, hair, and feathers cannot be digested, so after a time they are thrown up in the shape of little balls, called "castings," and by examining them we can find out exactly what the bird has been eating.

Most of the birds we are acquainted with pick their food very carefully, and eat only that which will digest without trouble. You can see them hold it down with one foot, looking at it closely to be quite sure that it is really good to eat. They often pull it to shreds and swallow it in little bits. If it is a butterfly dinner, the wings are torn off and sent floating to the ground. If it is a grasshopper supper, the tough, wiry legs of the insect are thrown away, and only the rich, luscious breast and fat thighs are eaten.

In California we have the pepper tree, which is all covered with clusters of red berries. Under the thin, red skin is a sweet, soft pulp which covers the seed. The pulp is all there is of the pepper berry which the birds can digest. But this is a very sweet morsel indeed, and tourist birds come a long distance to get it.

Robin redbreasts, come here in winter to eat our pepper berries, and then, of course, they disgorge the hard seeds, which they cannot possibly digest, just as the owls do the bones of their prey.

Merula migratoria propinqua.

We think the mocking-birds have taught the robins to do this, and we have noticed the wax-wings doing the same thing.

Ampelis cedrorum.

When the winter tourist birds make a raid on our yards, we can hear the tiny pepper seeds fall in a shower on our tin roofs, under the tall trees, and the door-steps will be covered. Sometimes the seeds come down so thick and fast that we can think of nothing but a hail-storm. The pepper berries ripen in midwinter, and it is worth one's while to see a flock of robins and wax-wings come into our yard. In a few days almost every pepper tree has been robbed, and nothing is left us but the brown seeds.

These, and other birds from the north who come to pay us a visit in winter, are tamer than they are at home. They seem to think that we are on our honor to be polite to strangers, and so we are.

If you watch closely, wherever you live, at some time in the year you will see visiting birds in your yard and you ought to be polite to them.