cognatus

Vegetable food.—The vegetable portion of the food of the species is made up of fruit, with a few seeds and a little miscellaneous matter more or less accidental. Fruit collectively amounts to 35.30 per cent, of which 12.14 per cent was thought to be of cultivated varieties and so recorded, while the remainder, 23.16 per cent, was quite certainly of wild species. This percentage of cultivated fruit is more than three times the record of the wood thrush, while the wild fruit eaten is correspondingly less, as the sum total of the fruit consumed is very nearly the same with both birds. From this percentage of domestic fruit one might infer that the veery was, or might be, a serious menace to fruit growing, but no such complaints have been heard, and it is probable that the species is not numerous enough to damage cultivated crops. A close inspection, however, of the fruit eating of the veery removes all doubts. The cultivated fruit, so called, was in every case either strawberries or Rubus fruits, i. e., blackberries or raspberries, and as both of these grow wild and in abundance wherever the veery spends its summer, it is probable that all of the fruit eaten was taken from wild plants, though 12.14 per cent has been conventionally recorded as cultivated.

Besides fruit, the veery eats a few seeds of grasses and weeds and a few of sumac, but none of the poisonous species were found in the stomachs. These seeds (7.25 per cent of the food) were eaten so irregularly as to suggest that they are merely a makeshift taken for want of something better. Rubbish (0.18 per cent), consisting of decayed wood, bits of leaves, plant stems, etc., completes the vegetable food.

Following is a list of the items of vegetable food and the number of stomachs in which found: