442 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



agency than the birds could the ravages of insects be kept down, and 

 the commission called for prompt and energetic remedies to prevent 

 the destruction of birds. 



For some years prior to 1877 vast numbers of red-winged black- 

 birds were poisoned in the spring and autumn around the cornfields 

 of Nebraska. This was done in the belief that the blackbirds were 

 damaging the crops, especially the wheat. Great numbers of prairie 

 chicken, quail, plover, and various other insect-eating species were 

 destroyed at the same time by eating the poisoned grain. Then 

 came 1877, and with it Nemesis. The locusts appeared in countless 

 numbers. There were no birds to eat them, and Nebraska mourned. 



In 1895 the ravages of two species of cut-worms and some 10 

 species of locusts produced a famine in the region of Ekaterinburg, 

 which is in Eussian Siberia. The local Society of Natural Sciences 

 inquired into the cause which had permitted such a numerous propa- 

 gation of insect pests, and reported that it was due to the almost 

 complete destruction of birds, most of which had been killed and 

 sent abroad by wagon loads for millinery purposes. 



Those grass ticks which now make the keeping of most breeds 

 of cattle impossible in Jamaica, are not mentioned in the records 

 of the early nineteenth century. The appalling destruction in more 

 recent years of insect-eating birds, chiefly to supply the demands 

 of the millinery market, has led to an inordinate increase of the 

 ticks and to the dying out of all but Indian cattle. This correlation 

 of birds and ticks — to say nothing of mosquitos and other insect 

 plagues in Jamaica — was put fully and circumstantially before the 

 secretary of state for the colonies by a deputation in 1909. 



E. D. Morel has recently pointed out how the reckless destruction 

 of the guinea-fowl {Numida) in French "West Africa is coincident 

 with the increase of certain germ diseases, and, above all, with 

 ravages to crops on the parts of the larger insects, especially beetles, 

 the grubs of which were devoured by the guinea-fowl, which 

 scratched them out of the ground. 



Though I could give a hundred cases similar to the foregoing, I 

 must rely on the few I have cited to show that the wholesale de- 

 struction of birds is surely followed by disaster to man. 



VALUE OF THE BIRD IN CHECKING INSECT IRRUPTIONS. 



When the Mormons first settled in Utah, their crops were de- 

 stroyed utterly by myriads of black crickets that streamed down 

 from the mountains. Promising fields of wheat in the morning were 

 by evening as bare as though the land had not been sown. The first 

 year's crop having been destroyed, the Mormons had sowed seed 

 the second year, and again the crop promised well. But again the 



