lyo AMERICAN ORNITIIGLOGY. 



bery of our gardens, unless they are near a wood. In that case some birds 

 nest in the garden, that during the rearing of their young they may be 

 near the grounds that produce larviE. 



Most of the woodpeckers, the silvias, and the small thrushes, including 

 some of our most valuable birds, cannot rear their young except in a wild 

 wood. Yet all these, solitary as they are in their habits, increase under 

 favorable conditions with the multiplication of insects consequent upon the 

 culture of the soil. 



That the presence of birds means a scarcity of insects, and the destroy- 

 ing of every acceptable harbor for them a corresponding increase of the 

 agricultural pests, is borne out by incontestable facts. An orchard that 

 is nearly surrounded by a wild wood of much extent is not often infested 

 by borers and other injurious insects, and an apple tree growing in a little 

 clearing or open space is invariably exempt from the ravages of the com- 

 mon apple borer. The same exemption is observed in those fruit trees 

 that stand very near a wild wood, or any wood containing a spontane- 

 ous undergrowth. The explanation is that the wood affords a harbor to 

 the birds that destroy these insects in all their forms. Orchards and gar- 

 dens, on the contrary, which are located at any considerable distance from 

 a wood, have not this security. It is true that robins are very abundant 

 in orchards, which are their breeding places; but robins, though the most 

 useful birds that are known to exist, take all their food from the ground. 

 They destroy vast quantities of cutworms and chrysalids buried in the 

 soil, but they take very little of their insect food from the trees. The 

 birds that perform this work are the sylvias, woodpeckers, creepers, and 

 other species that live only in woods and thickets. 



The locust, which ravages the east with its voracious armies, is bred in 

 vast open plains, which admit the full heat of the sun to hasten the hatch- 

 ing of the eggs, gather no moisture to destroy them, and harbor no bird to 

 feed upon their larvs. It is only since the felling of the forests of Asia 

 Minor and Cyrene that the locust has become so fearfully destructive in 

 those countries; and the grasshopper, which now threatens to be almost 

 as great a pest to the agriculture of North American soils, breeds in seri- 

 ously injurious numbers only where a wide extent of surface is bare of 

 woods. 



When the farmer destroys the border shrubbery in his fields and the 

 thickets and woods on his hills, he exterminates the birds by hosts, while 

 the mischievous boy with his gun destroys only a few individuals. There 

 is no queston that if their increase were notcheckedby the tree-destroying 

 habits of model farmers, and the sporting habits of men and boys, birds of 

 every species would increase in the same ratio with the multiplication of 

 their insect food, and proportionally diminish their ravages. 



Frank H. Sweet, Waynesboro. Va. 



