The Children's Book of Birds

by Olive Thorne Miller

The white-throated sparrow, a large and very pretty bird, eats the seeds of smartweed and ragweed. Other finches like bittersweet, sorrel, and amaranth, all of which we are glad to have them eat.

The seed-eating birds can find their food in winter, even when snow covers the ground, because the dead weeds hold on to their seeds, and the snow is not often deep enough to cover them.

Some birds gather their food in the fall, and hide it away where they can find it in winter. Blue jays collect acorns and beech-nuts, and store them in a hole in a tree, or some other safe place, to eat when food is scarce. A woodpecker who lives in the West picks holes in the bark of a tree, and puts an acorn into each one.

The oddest store I know of was made by a woodpecker. He found a long crack in a post, and stuffed it full of live grasshoppers. He did not like dead grasshoppers. He wedged them into the crack so tightly that they could not get out, and I do not know that they wanted to. When grasshoppers were scarce in the fields, he came day after day to his queer storehouse, till he had eaten every one.

One of the woodpecker family who lives in Mexico stores nuts and acorns in the stems of plants. These stems are hollow and made in joints like bamboo. The bird cuts a hole at the upper end of a joint, and stuffs it full. When he wants his nuts, he cuts a hole at the lower end of the joint and pulls them out.

I once had a tame blue jay, who was fond of saving what he could not eat, and putting it safely away. The place he seemed to think most secure was somewhere about me, and he would come slyly around me as I sat at work, and try to hide his treasure about my clothes.

When it was a dried currant or bit of bread, I did not care; but when he came on to my shoulder, and tried to tuck a dead meal worm into my hair or between my lips, or a piece of raw beef under a ruffle or in my ear, I had to decline to be used as a storehouse, much to his grief.

He liked to put away other things as well as food. Matches he seemed to think were made for him to hide. His chosen place for them was between the breadths of matting on the floor.

Once he found a parlor match, hunted up a good opening, and put it in. Then he went on, as he always did, to hammer it down so tightly that it would stay. One of the blows of his hard beak struck the lighting end of the match, and it went off with a sharp crack. The noise and the flame which burst out made the bird jump three feet, and scared him nearly out of his senses.