What Bird Life Means to Us 



By El Coniancho 



Bird life, nieaiiina; the common wild birds with which every country boy 

 is familiar, from the old black crow to the meadow-lark, Ijlackbird, bobolink, and 

 all the rest of the song-birds, is of much more value each year to the people of 

 the United States than the biggest railroad system in the country. That may 

 seem to be a pretty broad statement, yet it falls far short of stating the actual facts. 



The agricultural department of the United .States CJovernnient has kept tab 

 on the birds, what they do, what they eat every day in the year, and what their 

 habits are, until now their lives are an open book. This work, done by the 

 biological survey, has brought out some very astonishing things besides natural 

 history, for it has been so thoroughly and so painstakingly done that not only is 

 the list of foods for each bird for the entire year accurately tabulated, but the 

 average bulk amount of each kind of food is known so closely that values in 

 dollars and cents can be reckoned, and thus the actual live value to the nation 

 of each individual bird be easily computed. 



For forty years I have made it a part of my daily life to watch and to 

 study all nature, and especially to study our common song-birds. This has 

 given me a great volume of accurate information so that I have for years had 

 a very good working idea of the value of birds as insect and weed seed destroyers. 



It remained for the biological survey, however, to get these things down 

 to scientific accuracy because, where I was only one man, they put hundreds 

 of observers into the field and thus w'erc able to carry on a system of espionage 

 that covered every State in the Union simultaneously. In addition to this they 

 were able to bring in expert scientific observers and laboratory men whose life 

 business is the study of bugs, good, bad and indifferent. This system was 

 organized and the laboratory men began to examine the crops of birds sent in 

 by hunters from all over the country. 



Immediately things began to happen; certain insects were found (in whole 

 specimens and fragments) in the crops of many birds; certain other insects 

 were found only in the crops of certain birds. Some crojjs contained only 

 weed seeds of one kind or another ; others contained a great mixture of seeds 

 of various weeds, and many others contained both weeds and bugs. 



The strangest tlTing developed by this work was that robins and certain 

 other birds, long accused of being fruit eaters and, therefore, detrimental to 

 mankind, were absolutely cleared of the charge because their diet is almost 

 entirely insects with only here and there a cherry ! Every robin is entitled to 

 the few cherries he eats because without him there would be no cherries for 

 anybody, for he destroys the insects that destroy cherries and when he is in the 

 cherry-tree he is eating more insects than cherries. 



Many other supposed-to-l)e-harmful birds were found to be just as iielpful. 

 and there is no guesswork about it now ! 



516 



