340 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



man went out into one of those valleys up in the foothills of 

 the mountains and set out a fruit orchard and the land proved 

 favorable, all the conditions were favorable, the trees made a good 

 growth and when they came into bearing, he expected to receive a 

 good return on his investment. It happened that the first year 

 that the trees were in full bearing there was almost an entire 

 failure of the native fruit upon the mountains above him, and the 

 robins that ordinarily would live on that native fruit and that 

 much prefer the native fruit, if they have their choice, came down on 

 to his orchard and cleaned out everything as fast as it ripened. 

 Naturally he was very wrathy and he' went down on the lowlands 

 and went around among the orchardists there and tried to get them 

 to unite with him in a petition to the Legislature to have the law 

 changed so that they could kill the robins, and he could not find 

 a single person who would unite with him in that campaign. They 

 said, ''We know they have taken some of our fruit, but we have 

 become convinced that on the whole they do us more good than 

 they do harm." The food of the robin has probably been studied 

 more carefully than that of any other bird, and it has been found 

 that while it does take some fruit, yet, when the young are in 

 the nest, those young are fed almost entirely on insect food, and 

 the amount of food that a young robin takes is almost beyond 

 belief. It eats more than its own weight of food every day. Now 

 just think what would happen in this hotel here, what this pro- 

 prietor would think, if you folks should undertake to do that. And 

 as I said, that food is almost entirely insect food and that comes 

 at the time of the year when our crops are growing fastest, when 

 insects are most numerous, When the insects are doing the most 

 damage to the crops, so that the birds help us most just when we 

 most need their help. 



There is another bird, the woodthrush, on the screen here now, 

 whose food and habits are practically the same as those of the robin, 

 and I just wanted to show the results of that large amount of in- 

 sect food that the birds take. The bird from the egg to this stage 

 is about four or five days and in about the same amount more, 

 that is in about ten or eleven days from the time the egg is 

 hatched, the birds have become old enough to get out from the nest, 

 so you can see the very rapid growth that comes from that very 

 large amount of insect food that they take. 



The bluejay is another one of our birds about which there has 

 been some discussion. Personally I have known bluejays all my 

 life. Where I was raised in southern Wisconsin, we had them in our 

 yard; they nested there; we had them there all the year through 

 and I never saw the least signs of any trouble of the bluejay with 

 the other birds. There were plenty of other species nesting right 

 around there They were all on good terms, and yet reports come 

 into our office every little while of bluejays doing damage. 



The bobolink is a bird which used to be counted, as one of the 

 injurious birds. It has been a little queer in conditions of affairs there. 

 Years ago when South Carolina was the principal rice growing 

 state in the United States, there is no doubt that tlie bobolink did a 

 good deal of damage. The bobolink winters down in South America, 

 way down in Brazil, and sometimes in its northward migration it 

 gets up into Florida and South Carolina about the time the rice 



