256 Crows 
May beetles, and grasshoppers. Seeds of various 
kinds are also eaten by the crow, although upon the 
whole this is probably rather beneficial than otherwise. 
To be perfectly fair, however, I must mention 
some of the most flagrant crimes of the crows. Prob- 
ably the one most talked about among ornithologists 
is that of the destruction of the eggs and young of wild 
birds. This is one of the crow’s worst habits. But 
his bad reputation has grown more out of the farmer’s 
grievance against him—that he steals corn. It is 
true that the crow does sometimes pull up the tender 
blades for the kernel at the root, but even here he 
is condemned upon appearances rather than upon 
actual facts. In other words, the farmers accuse the 
crows of pulling corn until it is four or five inches in 
height, every time they alight upon a cornfield. Now 
the fact of it is that the crows are after insects of 
various kinds and other food, rather than the corn, 
although the corn may be pulled at the same time. | 
A farmer acquaintance of mine was greatly dis- 
tressed over the crows that visited the field in which 
he had planted corn. He talked so much about it 
that I visited the field several times both before and 
after the corn was up, and I saw but slight evidence 
that the crows were disturbing it. I told him so, but 
he seemed to have little confidence in my theory that 
