PREVENTING THE DEPREDATIONS OF RIRDS. 299 



there is no doubt that he will bear contemplative observation. 

 Any person interested in agriculture who will make himself 

 acquainted with the habits of this bird will be convinced that 

 it is emphatically worth while to make every effort to avoid 

 its depredations by harmless means. 



Where granivorous birds other than crows have injurious 

 habits, eternal vigilance appears to be the only means of de- 

 fence. Jays are occasionally thievish when corn is ripe. 

 Blackbirds pick up newly-sown grain and also plunder the 

 matured crop during their autumnal movements when they 

 are in flocks. Bobolinks are mischievous only in the rice- 

 fields, but there they are so bad as to be absolute pests. 



Fortunately, in most localities none of these birds do appre- 

 ciable harm. Only fields adjacent to woodland are raided by 

 jays. Blackbirds make their head-quarters in marshes during 

 spring and summer, and therefore the range of their operations 

 is restricted. In sections visited by the immense flocks that 

 assemble to spend fall and winter together there is always 

 more or less complaint against them. But it is not always 

 safe, when blackbirds are in a grain-field, to infer they are 

 doing harm. We know an instance in which a farmer killed 

 numbers of them, fully believing them to be eating his grain, 

 but when their stomachs were opened it was found they had 

 taken nothing but insects. It is generally true that the drafts 

 made by any of these smaller grain-eating birds are more than 

 compensated for by the good they do. For this reason they 

 should never be molested unless it is certain they are eating 

 grain. 



None of these birds are susceptible to any but human scare- 

 crows. Images, traps, cages, dead of their own kind, have no 

 terrors for them. Half a flock may be shot down one day, 

 and the next the surviving half is as likely to visit that field as 

 any other. They do not appear to have an iota of the keen- 

 ness that characterizes the crow. This inferiority in mental 

 capacity is an unsurmountable obstacle to avoiding their clep- 



