and sleepy butterfly children wind themselves in their silken covers and rest 

 quietly still spring calls them to unfold their wings and seek the flowers. 



Beneath the bark, in the inside rooms, live the wood borers, and up and down 

 the long hallways boring ants run busily to and fro. 



In the spring the eggs left in the bark hatch into hungry worms, and thou- 

 sands of these new guests climb up to the airy roof gardens of the tree hotels to 

 dine in the green banquet halls on fruit and leaves. Indeed, so many hungry in- 

 sect folk board in the hotels, and live on the wood and leaves, that if no bound 

 were put on their work the boarders would quite eat up their hotels. 



One small wood borer alone can kill a whole great tree, and thousands and 

 thousands of hungry worms and insects are always at work in our shade trees. 



Wood ants finds the holes the borers have made, and go on from them, 

 tunneling deeper and deeper into the heart of the trees, till they have honey- 

 combed the timber with their galleries. Anyone who goes to the woods can see 

 their work. Did you never find a pile of sawdust at the foot of a tree, or see a 

 streak of the dust on the bark? That is the work of the ants, and while you 

 watch, one of the little black workmen will often come out of a hole in the bark, 

 drop its load of dust, and hurry back inside for more. The poor trees suffer 

 sorely, but, fortunately, there are not only hungry insects, but also hungry birds ; 

 and the birds, knowing full well that the trees are their best banquet halls, flock 

 to them eagerly. 



The woodpeckers spend most of their time chiseling through the bark for 

 insects, so well hidden in the wood that only such sharp bills and barbed tongues 

 as theirs can reach them. In winter they join the cheery chickadees, searching 

 here and there over the crannies of the bark for insect's eggs. The champion 

 of their band has such a good appetite that it thinks nothing of eating five thousand 

 eggs a day. 



Besides the special bark and wood birds that meet over the trunks and 

 branches, protecting the body of the tree, there are other birds that guard its 

 head and feet. 



Every country boy knows how mice girdle the apple trees, gnawing their 

 bark just above the snow in winter. They do so much harm we would often 

 have to go without apples if it were not for the hawks and owls ; but these birds 

 are great mousers, and work night and day to save the orchards. 



The tree-top protectors are more numerous than any of the other tree birds, 

 and when the leaves come out in the spring they fall to work with a will. 



When an army of insects descends upon an orchard or grove, baring the trees 

 of leaves, nearly all the birds in the whole neighborhood come to the rescue. 

 And so the birds work all through the year — the tree-trunk birds and owls in 

 winter, and the tree-top birds in summer — all working to protect the trees, which 

 the insects are trying to destroy. 



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