138 DESTKUCTION OF INSECTS. 



growth, inhabit in succession the earth, the water, and the air. 

 In each of these elements they have their special enemies, and, 

 deep and dark as are the minute recesses in which they hide 

 themselves, they are pursued to the remotest, obscurest corners 

 by the executioners that nature has appointed to punish their 

 delinquencies, and furnished with cunning contrivances for fer- 

 reting out the offenders and dragging them into the hght of day. 

 One tribe of birds, the woodpeckers, seems to depend for subsist- 

 ence almost wholly on those insects which breed in dead or dying 

 trees, and it is, perhaps, needless to say that the injury these birds 

 do the forest is imaginary. They do not cut holes in the trunk 

 of the tree to prepare a lodgment for a future colony of boring 

 larvae, but to extract the worm which has already begun his min- 

 ing labors. Hence these birds are not found where the forester 

 removes trees as fast as they become fit habitations for such in- 

 sects. In clearing new lands in the United States, dead trees, 

 especially of the spike-leaved kinds, too much decayed to serve 

 for timber, and which, in that state, are worth httle for fuel, are 

 often allowed to stand until they fall of themselves. Such stuls, 

 as they are popularly called, are fiUed with borers, and often 

 deeply cut by the woodpeckers, whose strong bills enable them to 

 penetrate to the very heart of the tree and drag out the lurking 

 larvse. After a few years, the stubs fall, or, as wood becomes 

 valuable, are cut and carried off for firewood, and, at the same 

 time, the farmer selects for f elHng, in the forest he has reserved 

 as a permanent source of supply of fuel and timber, the decaying 

 trees which, like the dead stems in the fields, serve as a home for 

 both the worm and his pursuer. "We thus gradually extirpate 



birds, snared and shot out of season, are boiled and fed to swine. On one day 

 there stood, in the corner of two streets, a wagon containing one hundred and 

 eighty dozen of prairie chickens, while on the near sidewalk were piled thirty- 

 seven boxes, containing five hundred and sixty dozen of quails, corrupt, de- 

 composing, and condemned by the health oflBcers. They are trapped, shot 

 and snared, and sent to the market where they find a ready sale up to the mid- 

 dle of March ; but even after that, the indiscriminate slaughter continues. The 

 yoimg birds and setting hens are alike captured and sent to Chicago and other 

 cities, on commission, and destined to be fed to swine. The birds must soon 

 disappear before such recklessness and vice. In fact they have disappeared, 

 almost entirely, from many "Western localities, and grasshoppers and other 

 noxious insects have, in consequence, multiplied and swarmed forth to spread 

 famine and desolation over the land." 



