CAUGHT BY A CLAM The oyster catcher, a large black and white relative of the sandpiper, feeds on, among other things, shellfish. Mussels and oysters look like hard nuts to crack, even with a stout, wedgelike bill such as that of the oyster catchers. The oyster catcher's favorite feeding times are when the tide has fallen and the shellfish are first exposed to the air and before they have closed up their shells, and again when the tide is rising and the shells are just beginning to open. The oyster catcher stabs into the shell, and with its bill cuts the strong adductor muscles that hold the shells of the bivalves together. The rest is easy. But a danger lurks here: what about stabbing into too big a shellfish, or making an inept stab? And this very thing has happened. On the South Carolina coast Mr. W. P. Baldwin found a trapped, drowned bird. It was held, with the tip of its bill caught in the shell of a hard-shell clam, as if in a trap. Apparently the rising tide had flooded and drowned the bird. The raven eats most anything, living or dead, and except for man has little to fear in the northern forests where it lives. Yet from Wisconsin comes a record of one that met his death through a porcupine. The porcupine's quills are a dreadfully prickly covering that one would think would protect it from most encounters. Yet one animal, the fisher, kills and eats it as a matter of course, and wolves and bears sometimes eat them without too many ill-effects from the spines. The slow-moving porcupine has little regard for automobiles, and many are run over on country roads. A porcupine is too big and tough for a raven to kill and the Wisconsin raven had probably fed on a dead porcupine. Stuck through its gizzard was a quill, and another, which had apparently caused its death, was stuck in its heart, having apparently worked there from the digestive tract. Many small insectivorous birds eat spiders as well as insects. This they do almost with impunity in temperate latitudes, where only occasionally do spiders make webs strong enough to trap a bird. But in the tropics, where there are more large spiders, their webs must be a greater hazard to birds. That the hazard exists in both climes, however, is shown by a goldfinch reported caught in a spider's web in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and a dusky flycatcher caught in a spider's web in Cameroons, West Africa. SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT [Illustration] To care for the weak, the unfit, and the cripple is usually considered an extremely highly developed altruism in our society. As our society progresses, more and more provisions are made for the unfit. In nature the unfit usually is soon weeded out. If an animal is unable to feed itself it is doomed; or if it is less successful than its fellows it has less chance of leaving progeny. That is natural selection.