426 ANNUAL, REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1920. 



loopers. These birds would alight in the fields and feed on the larvae 

 daily until they would clean them up and save the crop." Mr. Dunn 

 further remarks in a letter to the Biological Survey that : " At various 

 times they have been known to save whole crops of cabbage and 

 lettuce when the cabbage worm or looper was destroying them. Just 

 a few days after I mentioned this bird to Mr. F. H. Chittenden they 

 came into my field and what worms the poison had not reached they 

 devoured." (Corpus Christi, Texas, Dec. 6, 1901.) 



Mr. J. L. Harris records 31 the fact that another cabbage pest, the 

 diamond-back moth {Plutella maculipennis) , was entirely extirpated 

 from his patch by a flock of blackbirds. He notes, however, that they 

 tore the cabbage considerably in getting them. 



Ground cutworms are a familiar pest to every gardener and 

 farmer ; they are freely eaten by a large number of birds, and some- 

 times, it appears, entirely destroyed by birds in small areas. 



Mr. G. U. Clark, writing from East Northfield, Massachusetts, 

 June 24, 1919, states that introduced starlings 



have been conspicuous among the crow blackbirds the past few days, picking 

 cutworms from a recently mowed patch by the house where I am staying. I 

 noticed years ago, and published in the Independent, that we have no native 

 bird so diligent in the pursuit of cutworms ; when I lived in New Haven, 

 Connecticut, my place was so overrun with cutworms that I had to give up 

 trying to raise early peas and lettuce, but after the starlings arrived they 

 speedily rid the place of them almost entirely. 



In further reference to effective bird enemies of cutworms, Mr. 

 Irving C. Emmitt, a Federal game warden, reports that — 



In the spring of 1918 the tomato growers in northern Utah were very much 

 worried about the cutworm. The tomato plants are generally set out between 

 the 1st and 15th of May, and during this spring in some districts, especially 

 near the shores of the Great Salt Lake, where the soil is of a sandy loam, the 

 cutworms would attack these young plants and some nights would cut down as 

 high as 10 acres during the one night. It was soon noticed that in fields where 

 there were birds, especially meadow larks, the cutworm did not bother the 

 plants, consequently an investigation was made as to whether the meadow lark 

 was attacking the cutworm. Together with the county agent, the writer went 

 out among the different fields and found that wherever there were meadow 

 larks in the field the tomato plants had been practically left alone. We killed 

 one meadow lark while in one of these fields, and upon examining its stomach 

 found it contained 36 cutworms. Since that time the- farmers in this tomato- 

 raising district have encouraged the breeding of meadow larks, and you will 

 find thousands there now where there were only hundreds before, the result 

 being that the cutworms are not bothering the tomatoes anything like they 

 did previously. In fact, the farmers look upon the meadow larks as saviours to 

 them, and if anyone was found shooting a meadow lark in this district it 

 might go very hard with him. 



81 Trans. Minn. State Hort. Soc, Jan., 1878, p. 63. 



