The Purple Martin {Progne suhis) 



Length, about 8 inches. 



Range : Breeds throughout the United States and southern Canada, south 

 to central ^Mexico ; winters in South America. 



Habits and economic status : This is the largest as it is one of the most 

 beautiful of the swallow tribe. It formerly built its nests in cavities of trees, 

 as it still does in wild districts, but learning that man was a friend it soon adopted 

 domestic habits. Its presence about the farm can often be secured by erecting 

 houses suitable for nesting sites and protecting them from usurpation by the 

 English sparrow, and every effort should be made to increase the number of 

 colonies of this very useful bird. The boxes should be at a reasonable height, 

 say 15 fefet from the ground, and made inaccessible to cats. A colony of these 

 birds on a farm makes great inroads upon the insect population, as the birds 

 not only themselves feed upon insects but rear their young upon the same diet. 

 Fifty years ago in New England it was not uncommon to see colonies of 50 pairs 

 of martins, but most of them have now vanished for no apparent reason except 

 that the martin houses have decayed and have not been renewed. Alore than 

 three-fourths of this bird's food consists of wasps, bugs, and beetles, their 

 importance being in the order given. The beetles include several species of 

 harmful weevils, as the clover-leaf weevils and the nut weevils. Besides these 

 are many crane flies, moths. May flies, and dragonflies. 



Behold the Birds! 



By Charles Edward Jefferson 



It was just like Jesus to say this. He was always calling attention to the 

 sights and sounds of the natural world. He reveled in God's out-of-doors. He 

 never wearied of reading the pages of the book of nature. Nature was to him 

 a bible, and in it he read the character and ways of God. "Look at the sun- 

 shine and the shower," he said one day. They illustrated for him a truth which 

 men are all the time in danger of forgetting. One day when some birds were 

 fluttering above his head, he said to the people who were listening to him : "Look 

 at the birds !" He did not ask them to look at them out of scientific curiosity. 

 He was not specially interested in their anatomy or their plumage. He saw in 

 them a medium of revelation. He found in them a religious message. He used 

 them as a means of moving the heart nearer to God. I wish I might open your 

 eyes and ears and hearts a little wider to the wonder and mystery of the bird 

 world, so that you might cry out with a fresh rapture: "O Lord, our Lord, 

 how excellent is thy name in all the earth !" 



What a mystery a bird is ! Tennyson has said in one of the best of his 

 short poems that if he knew a little flower completely, in all its essences and 

 relationships, he would know both man and God. But a bird is a greater mys- 



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