THE 



NATURE-STUDY REVIEW 



DEVOTED TO ALL PHASES OF NATURE-STUDY IN SCHOOLS 



Vol. 2 DECEMBER, 1906 No. 9 



A DAY'S WORK IN BIRD-LAND 



BY EDNA RUSSELL THAYER 



Worcester, Mass. 



[Editorial Note.— This most interesting record of some careful and patient 

 observing ought to stimulate more such work as well as give information. If 

 other readers of The Review have made similar studies, notes are wanted for 

 publication.] 



An eight-hour working clay, from eight to twelve and one to five, 

 is the cry of the times, and you have doubtless heard the story of the 

 workman who left his pick-axe suspended in the air at the stroke of 

 five in order not to work overtime. Search as we might, we should 

 find but a few rare souls who would be willing to work twelve hours 

 in a day and beyond that I fear we should call it not work but some- 

 thing akin to slavery. 



But of a day's work in bird-land, how little we really know! We 

 have read that in Massachusetts the birds eat twenty-one thousand 

 bushels of insects in a day; and in Nebraska one hundred and 

 seventy carloads. In Iowa the tree-sparrows are supposed to eat 

 two and one-third tons of weed seeds daily. And perhaps the most 

 marvelous estimate of all is that a young robin eats so many insects 

 in a day that if a man should eat in like proportion he would require 

 a bologna sausage three inches in diameter and sixty feet long. 



These are probably as accurate as estimates may be and help much 

 toward a truer appreciation of the value of bird-life to a community, 

 but actual facts are doubly convincing. And so in last July when 

 Professor Hodge, of Clark University, was invited to spend a week 

 with the students of the Biological Station of the University of 

 Indiana, at Winona Lake, and direct their studies of birds he planned 

 days with the birds. 



On two mornings the class of twenty-three members met on a con- 



