During the first few weeks after coming out of the winter den much of the grizzly's food is likely to be of the salad order--juicy young plant stalks, watery shoots, tender bark, young grasses, buds, and leaves. In late autumn, just before hibernating, his last courses are mostly roots and nuts. However, the normal grizzly is an omnivorous feeder, refusing only human flesh. He will eat anything that is edible--meat (fresh, stale, or carrion), wasps, yellow-jackets, grasshoppers, ants and their eggs, bugs, and grubs. Of course he eats honey and the bees. He also captures snakes, and many a rat and rabbit. He is a destroyer of many pests that afflict man, and in the realm of economic biology he should be rated high. I doubt if a dozen cats, hawks, or owls annually catch as many mice as the average grizzly. The food of a grizzly is largely determined by locality. Along the streams of the northern Pacific Coast he lives chiefly upon fish, while the grizzlies in the Bitter Root Mountains and British Columbia generally feed upon roots and plants. Those in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and the Southwest have a mixed diet. The spring-beauty, the dog-tooth violet, and the shooting-star, both tops and roots, supply the grizzlies of some localities with much of their food, while in other regions they rarely, and possibly never, touch them, though they grow abundantly. The bears in the Bitter Root Mountains eat the shooting-star freely, while the violet and the spring-beauty are favored by the bears of the Selkirks. Yet, strange though it is, the bears of both localities pay but little attention to carcasses which they find. One of the plant roots which the bears of British Columbia dig out in autumn until the ground is frozen, is a wild pea, the hedysarum. I frequently followed a grizzly whose home territory was close to my cabin in the Rocky Mountains. Apparently he liked everything. One day he spent hours digging out mice. On another he caught a rabbit. He ate a bumblebee's nest, and, with the nest, the grass, the bees, their young, their honey, and their stings. In a homesteader's garden he dug out and ate nearly one hundred pounds of potatoes and turnips. The homesteader thought that a hog had been in his garden. In places I too have thought that hogs had been rooting where bears had simply been digging for roots--places with dug and upturned earth often many square yards in extent. They dig out the roots of the wild parsnip, the shooting-star, and grass, the bulbs of lilies, and sometimes the roots of willow and alder.