No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 339 



uncommon through the summertime; they are almost a rare bird 

 in the breeding season, and coming up here yesterday, I noticed 

 particularly as I got north of Tittshurgh and up into this northern 

 part of the State how numerous were the robins. The train 

 scarcely passed a farmhouse anywhere without my seeing from two 

 to four or five pairs of robins. It seems queer that the English 

 sparrow should have been brought to this country, because it was 

 brought to rid the trees in Central Park, New York City, of the 

 worms that were destroying them. Well, the sparrows never did 

 eat those worms, they never would, they are insect eaters but they 

 found here a climate that was congenial, they found plenty of 

 food and they have multiplied until now they extend from ocean 

 to ocean and have become, as 1 said, almost our most common 

 bird. And yet I was glad to see, a few years ago that even the 

 English sparrow could do some good. We had there in Washing- 

 ton an attack of the seventeen year locusts and they were very abun- 

 dant, just a hum all day long, and from the time those locusts 

 came out of the ground the English sparrow practically gave up 

 all other food and devoted itself to the seventeen year locust. It 

 would fly up in the trees, grab a locust, bring it down to the ground 

 and it seemed to recognize that if it ate the whole locust it would 

 get filled up too soon, so it would just grab it by the head, pound 

 it up and down on the pavement, pull off the head, eat that, leave 

 the body and get another locust. It must have killed thousands and 

 tens of thousands of locusts, so there is one good deed you will 

 have to credit to the English sparrow. 



The crow I suppose has been the cause of more profanity than 

 any other bird in the State of Pennsylvania, and yet I doubt if 

 even the crow is quite so black as he is painted. He does like to 

 pull up your corn and has been accused, and I guess rightfully, of 

 stealing eggs out of birds' nests and taking even the young birds, 

 but there are two sides even to the crow question. You take it 

 along in the spring when the young crows are just growing and 

 they have got tremendous appetites and keep those old birds hustling 

 all day long to fill the mouths of those young crows, which are fed 

 quite largely on the white grub of the larva of the May beetle, 

 which is one of the bad insects or bugs on the corn or strawberries, 

 in the -grass patch and then later on in the season when the young 

 are full grown, both the old and the young feed quite largely on 

 the grasshoppers; so you see there are two sides even to the crow 

 question. 



I suppose the robin has been the cause of more discussion than 

 any other one bird. I remember once we were having a meeting 

 down at Lancaster and I had been talking in favor of the birds 

 and a man got up and said, "I want to register a protest against 

 the robin; it does us a great deal of damage in our fruit." When 

 he sat down, another man got up and said that that was just his 

 experience exactly. It is only a little while ago that the people in 

 New Jersey, the fruit growers in New Jersey undertook to ^ get 

 the New Jersey laws changed so as to allow the killing of robins; 

 but the friends of the robins proved more numerous than the fruit 

 men and succeeded in keeping the law on the statute books that 

 .prohibits their killing. I think the worst hard luck story I have 

 ever heard in regard to the robins comes from California. A gentle- 



