vou oi7 | Recent Literature. 497 
commenced and was nearly completed....by the use of strychnine baits 
laid for dingoes, wild dogs, wedge-tailed eagles, and crows, for it attracted 
and killed out most of our numerous useful small eagles and hawks” 
(p: 22). 
The authors go on to say: ‘‘The carrion and carnivorous birds were so 
numerous less than forty years ago that very little carrion about the home 
station or sheep paddocks remained long enough to decay or to feed mag- 
gots. The inhabitants of the Southern United States and Mexico are 
wiser with their scavenger birds. They protect the turkey buzzard or 
vulture which is semi-domesticated in their towns, and so numerous that 
even a dead horse or bullock is stripped to the bone before it has been dead 
twenty-four hours’’ (p. 22). Whatever the merits of this encomium it 
now comes rather as coals of fire for the Southern States mostly have 
reversed their policy respecting the buzzard chiefly on account of a con- 
jectural relation of the bird to the spread of stock diseases.1 
Messrs. Froggatt are of the opinion that “the carrion-destroying birds 
had a very great deal to do with the reduction of the numbers of insects 
like blow-flies. .. .far more than the true insectivorous birds.’”’ However, 
some of the latter are commended for feeding upon the sheep-maggot flies, 
among them the Noisy Minah (Myzantha garrula), the White-eared Honey- 
eater (Ptilotis penicillata) and the Willy Wagtail (Rhipidura tricolor). Two 
of these are additional to the four groups mentioned in the previous report. 
A further warning is sounded regarding the starling.— W. L. M. 
Economic Ornithology in recent Entomological Publications.— 
In a report on white grubs which injure sugar cane in Porto Rico,? Mr. E. 
G. Smyth gives considerable credit to bird enemies of these pests. He 
refers to the results of stomach examination cited in Wetmore’s ‘ Birds of 
Porto Rico’ * and gives an account of some of his own field observation. 
“The blackbird or “‘mosambique,” Mr. Smyth says, “is placed as the 
most important bird enemy of white-grubs because of its great abundance 
in those parts of the Island where the white-grubs are most injurious, 
namely, in the arid coast districts. It is a very common sight to observe 
considerable flocks of these birds following the plows and picking up grubs 
when fields cleared of cane are being broken up.....At Santa Rita, near 
Guanica Centrale, during the winter plowing season, actual observation 
and count, it was shown that over 90 per cent of the grubs exposed to light 
by the plows are picked up by these birds, so that the employment of 
peons to follow the plows and pick grubs is quite unnecessary in that dis- 
trict. When it is considered that a bird is able to consume more than the 
equivalent of its own weight of food in twenty-four hours, and that black- 
birds during the plowing season of five to six months subsist almost wholly 
1See ‘ The Auk’, 30, No. 2, April, 1913, pp. 295-8. 
2 Journ. Dept. Agr. Porto Rico, 1, No. 2, April, 1917, pp. 53-54. 
3 Bull. 326, U.S. Dept. Agr. 1916, reissued as Bull. 15, Insular Exp. Sta., P. R. 1916. 
