338 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



eud the discussion. But unfortunately, some birds are not bene- 

 ficial, although very fortunately the number is a very small part 

 of the total number of birds. We have here in Pennsylvania about 

 375 different kinds of birds, and out of those we can sav that 

 only three are entirely injurious. One of them we have on the 

 screen now, the great horned owl. Its food is quite largely the bene- 

 ficial bird. It is given here with a quail in its claws, although I 

 think that the painter, when he put that there, rather stretched 

 the facts of the case. I don't think that the great horned owl 

 ever does much injury to quail, but the next one we have on here, 

 Cooper's hawk, is shown with a quail in its claws because that is 

 probably the worst enemy, next to man, that the Bob White has. 

 The Cooper's hawk comes down in the field, and if he finds a covey 

 of quail he is pretty apt to stay right there until he has taken 

 the last one of them. The sharp-shinned hawk, which is very much 

 like the Cooper's hawk, only a little smaller, is the third one of 

 the three kinds of birds we have in the State which may be con- 

 sidered as entirely injurious. But I don't want you to consider 

 tliat because these birds that I have mentioned as injurious are 

 hawks and owls, that, therefore, all hawks and all owls are in- 

 jurious; on the contrary, the hawks and owls are among the good 

 friends of the farmer and we have had one experience at Washing- 

 ton which showed this very plainly. A pair of barn owls lived in 

 the tower of the Smithsonian Institution and a man there in Wash- 

 ington in our ofl&ce took it on himself to find out what those owls 

 were eating. An owl does not tear up its food very much, it 

 swallows it almost whole, and then the bones and hair, the in- 

 digestible parts, are thrown out as pellets from the mouth and 

 these pellets accumulate in large numbers where ever the hawks 

 roost or nest, and this gentleman went up in the tower of the 

 Smithsonian Institution and gathered up these pellets to see what 

 these owls had been eating and he found that those pellets were 

 composed almost entirely of the bones and hair of mice. He counted 

 the heads of over 700 mice in the pellets from that single pair 

 of owls in that one winter, so you can see how largely they have 

 been working for man's benefit. The two hawks on the screen there 

 now, the red tailed and the red shouldered, are those that are com- 

 monly called the hen hawks, and yet they do not deserve that name. 

 It is very seldom indeed that either of those, which are our largest 

 hawks, take anything in the poultry line. Their food is the smaller 

 mammals, mice. The sparrow hawk, our smallest hawk, receives 

 that name, sparrow hawk, simply because it is small. It really does 

 not eat sparrows, its food is very largely grasshoppers during the 

 summertime and mice in the winter. 



Then we come to the group of sparrows which are pre-eminently 

 the seed eaters, and yet we have one exception. Sparrows are bene- 

 ficial with just the one exception of the English sparrow, and un- 

 fortunately it liappens that it is the most numerous of all. I 

 had expectd when we made a bird census last year, a census of the 

 birds of the United States, that we would find the English sparrow 

 to be the most abundant bird in the United States, and I was, quite 

 surprised when the returns came in to find that the robin exceeded 

 it. Judging by the census of last year, the robin is the most num- 

 erous bird in the United States. To us who live there in Washing- 

 ton that seems a little queer, because robins with us are rather 



