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the food of the hhiebird is composed of insects and insect-like 

 animals. The house wren has about the same record. Meadow 

 larks consume cutworms, wire worms, crickets, and grasshop- 

 pers, as well as other injurious forms of insect life. The chicka- 

 dee, from its being an all-the-year-round resident, is particularly 

 useful in eating eggs of plant lice, or canker worms, and of tent 

 caterpillars. Four stomachs or crops of chickadees examined, 

 showed, as a result of a single day's feed. 1028 eggs of canker 

 worms, while in one of the stomachs there were 150 eggs of plant 

 lice. With the chickadees in winter, one frequently sees the 

 downy woodpecker, another useful resident, as is also the brown 

 creeper and the nut hatch. Almost all of our woodpeckers are 

 devourers of grubs working on shade trees. 



Most of our hawks and owls prey upon rabbits, gophers, and 

 squirrels, field mice, etc. Some of our smaller hawks, notably 

 the sparrow hawk, eat insects. Wrong impressions prevail re- 

 garding this group of birds and the farmer's boy has felt justi- 

 fied in shooting every hawk and owl met with, under the impres- 

 sion that he was doing agriculture a good turn thereby. As inti- 

 mated above, many of our hawks and owls are decidedly useful. 

 Crows also frequently pick up white grubs turned up by the plow, 

 and we have seen both blackbirds and crows in large numbers 

 eating grasshoppers in stubble fields. Of course, there are times 

 when a farmer or poultry raiser or berry raiser is justified in re- 

 sorting to a gun, but such times should be rare. 



The cuckoos, both yellow-billed and black-billed, are fond of 

 hairy caterpillars- — the tent caterpillars and fall web worms, for 

 example. The rose-breasted grosbeak is not only a beautiful 

 bird, and fine singer, but a good bug catcher as well. We have 

 observed it eating grasshoppers and potato beetles, and it is 

 known to consume canker worms, army worms, cutworms, and 

 chinch bugs. The gulls flying on our prairies and their close 

 allies, the small and graceful terns, do the farmers a good turn 

 (no pun intended) by catching grasshoppers. 



Amongst our game birds, the quail gets most of its grain after 

 the crop is harvested. It pays for it by eating many injurious 

 insects — potato worms, wire worms, cutworms, and others. Over 

 100 chinch bugs were found in the croj) of a quail shot early in 

 the morning. It is almost a i)ity that this 1)ird is not constantly 

 protected. The same might be said of the ground or mourning 

 dove, which is included in our game birds, and which is a great 

 devourer of weed seeds and takes but little grain. 



There are, of course, some bad birds, such as the shar])- 

 shinncfl hawk, Cooper's hawk, the goshawk, and the yellow-bel- 

 lied woodpecker, which sucks the sa]) from our shade and fruit 

 trees; and, let us add, ihc luiropean or F.nglish si);irr()\v. There 

 are also some birds of (l(HiI;tful utility, but take it all in all, the 

 birds, as a class, deserve our protection and the evident growth 

 of sentiment toward bird conscr\ation as evidenced by the pas- 



