6o Bulletin No. 27. 



MARTINS KILL THE CATERPILLARS. 



We know that the members of the Swallow family are insect eaters and 

 must therefore be entirely beneficial to agricultural interests, but we 

 really attach scanty importance to what they actually do in the way of 

 keeping down the insect/pests until the facts are forced upon us by some 

 concrete instance. Many a farmer or gardner or fruit grower has seriously 

 questioned whether the good they do after all compensates for the litter 

 which they are likely to leave about the out-buildings. When new, the 

 nests are objects of beauty, but in time they will crumble away, scat- 

 tering dirt and mud about in just the wrong places. Too often the per- 

 son benefitted fails to perceive the benefit because he has never known 

 the time when the swallows or martins were not a part of the furnishing 

 of his premises, or he has entirely forgotten the changed conditions since 

 the birds came to live with him. A concrete case of the real utility of 

 the Purple Martin comes to me in a clipping from the Dnity Kennebec 

 Journal, under the caption of this article. It is so good that I quote 

 it entire with the earnest plea that all skeptics as well as all others who 

 have not already provided for the entertainment of the Martins should 

 do so without further delay. 

 Edilors A'ennebec Journal : 



If you will allow me a little space in your agricultural columns I will 

 tell you what little I know to be a fact in regard to keeping caterpillars 

 and other worms and grubs from our apple trees. 



I have a small orchard near my house and my neighbors have the 

 same adjoining mine. Through all the caterpillar years for fifteen years 

 past these orchards have had but a very few caterpillar nests in them. 

 Last year there were but three nests in my orchard, while I had trees 

 about three-fourths of a mile away that were completely covered with 

 them and others were the same. Now the remedy. 



Eighteen years ago I had a large martin house built and set it in the 

 middle of my little orchard on a crotch pole about fifteen feet high. 

 The house was large enough for fourteen pairs of martins. The second 

 year every room was taken up by them and has been every year since. 



These birds raise from four to six young to a nest. They arrive here 

 from the eighteenth to the twenty-first of April, sometimes the snow 

 would still be two feet deep around the martin house pole. But they 

 come just the same and never vary from that time. They hatch their 

 young about the middle of June and begin to fly about the middle of 



