“Digestion completed, there remains in the stomach a confused mass of skins turned inside out and still wearing their fur, and bones stripped as clean as if they had been scraped with a knife. The bird then proceeds to rid itself of this encumbrance of innutritious matter. Grotesque retchings indicate the labor of this deliverance. Something makes its way upward through the extended throat, the beak opens, and the act is accomplished. A rounded mass falls to the ground, composed of skins, bones, hair, scales—in fact, everything that has defied digestion. All nocturnal birds of prey have this ignoble manner of freeing the stomach: they vomit in globular form the residue of their prey after the latter has been swallowed whole.” CHAPTER LV THE SMALLER BIRDS “Almost all the smaller birds are helpful to us in protecting the fruits of the earth from the ravages of insects. Their services deserve to be recorded in a long and detailed history, but time for that is lacking and we must confine ourselves to brief mention of a few of these valiant caterpillar-destroyers. “The titmouse, or tomtit, is a small bird full of life and showing a petulant humor. Always in action, it flits from tree to tree, examines the branches with minute particularity, perches on the swaying end of the frailest twig, where it clings persistently even though hanging head downward, accommodating itself to the oscillations of its flexible support without once relaxing its clutch or ceasing its scrutiny of the worm-infested buds, which it tears open in order to get at the enclosed vermin and insect-eggs. “It is calculated that a tomtit rids us of three hundred thousand of these eggs every year. It has to supply the needs of a family seldom equalled in size; but the support of twenty young ones, or even more, is not too heavy a burden for this active bird to bear. With this infant brood on its hands, it must give constant and careful inspection to buds and to fissures in the bark, in order to catch larvæ, spiders, caterpillars, little worms of all kinds, and thus find food for twenty beaks incessantly agape with hunger at the bottom of the nest. “Let us suppose the mother bird to arrive with a caterpillar. The nest is immediately all in a tumult: twenty beaks are stretched wide open, but only a single one receives the morsel, while nineteen are kept waiting. The indefatigable mother flies off again, and when the twentieth beak has at last been fed, the first has long since begun again its importunate demands. What a multitude of worms such a brood must consume!