496 Recent Literature. [eee 
maggot flies in Australia! As one of the measures directed toward the 
control of flies, carcasses are sprayed with arsenic water. Large numbers 
of flies are thus killed but there is no evidence that birds are destroyed by 
feeding upon the poisoned flies. The authors cite corroborative experience 
in South Africa where storks fed freely upon poisoned locusts without ill 
effects.” 
Messrs. Froggatt note that many people consider that rabbit poisoning 
operations are responsible for a decrease in the number of birds and there- 
fore for the pest of blowflies. The principal bait used for rabbits appears 
to be poisoned bran and as the work is done upon a large scale the bait is 
hauled about in carts. The authors express the opinion however that 
“the use of the poison-cart has been a very minor factor in the decrease 
of insectivorous birds, for with the exception of one or two, these birds do 
not follow the poison-cart to pick up the bits of poisoned bran or devour 
the dead rabbits.’ (p. 22). Where birds have been reduced it has been 
due chiefly to clearing of the land, to lack of water and to depredations of 
feral cats. 
The testimony of these Australian authors is interesting to us in the 
United States, as there are complaints that the use of poisoned bran as 
bait for cutworms has caused destruction of birds. The United States 
Bureau of Entomology which recommends this method has looked carefully 
into the question of possible effect upon birds and has decided that no harm 
is done. Nothing in the experience of the United States Biological Survey 
has inclined it to doubt this conclusion. 
When poisoned grain is used the effect is sometimes disastrous however, 
as Mr. 8. E. Piper stated in his report on the mouse plague in Nevada.? 
He remarks: “Unfortunately a large number of magpies and blackbirds 
fell victims to the poisoned grain; while to a less extent meadowlarks, 
killdeers, and mourning doves were killed.” 
The other point brought up by Messrs. Froggatt, the possible poisoning 
of predatory and carrion feeding birds by their eating animals killed by 
poisons has been carefully investigated by field men of the Biological 
Survey and their unanimous conclusion is that such destruction is negligible. 
Destruction of birds by direct feeding upon baits placed for predatory 
animals however, is another question and one that should be kept in mind 
at all times in the great campaign of this kind now being waged in our 
western states. In Australia ‘‘the destruction of the carrion-feeding birds 
1 Farmers’ Bull. 113, Dept. of Agric., New South Wales, June, 1917, p. 9 and pp. 21-24. 
Bull. No. 95 on the same subject was noticed in ‘ The Auk,’ 33, No. 2, April, 1916, p. 217. 
2JIn this connection see Mr. E. H. Forbush’s summary (Ninth Ann. Rep. State Orni- 
thologist, 1916, p. 24) of the examination of birds thought to have been killed by spraying 
operations in Massachusetts, ‘Thus far the evidence is chiefly negative, as in nine years 
only three birds that possibly were poisoned by spraying have been found.’’ Another 
valuable publication to consult is ‘Arsenical Residues after Spraying,’ by W. C. O’Kane, 
C. H. Hadley, Jr., and W. A. Osgood, Bull. 183, N. H. Agric. Exp. Sta., June, 1917. 
3 Yearbook, U. S. Dept. of Agric., 1908 (1909), p. 308. 
