228 ELEMENTS OF AGRICULTURE 



CHAPTER XLIIL— Seed-Eating Birds 



215. The Destruction of Weeds. — The successful 

 farmer must spend a part of his time and some money 

 in fighting weeds. The amount of time and money 

 he spends depends on how clean .he keeps his farm. 

 Weeds have been well defined as plants in the wron 

 place. Naturally all thrifty farmers are interested in 

 the destruction of weeds. They plow them under, they 

 dig them up, and pull them out by hand, -and yet some 

 escape to start a new crop the next season. Most weeds 

 produce great crops of seed; some weeds are known 

 that produce about one hundred thousand seed to a 

 single plant. If there were not some means of destroy- 

 ing at least a part of the seed produced by weeds, the 

 world would soon be overrun with them. Fortunately, 

 there are fully fifty different kinds of birds that eat the 

 seed of weeds, and the amount of seed destroyed by 

 these birds is enormous. We can only mention a few of 

 the birds individually. 



216. Birds that Destroy Weeds. — Probably the best 

 known seed-eating birds are sparrows. Beal says of the 

 sparrows that "there are some forty species, with nearly 

 as many subspecies, in North America, but their dif- 

 ferences, both in plumage and habits, are in most cases 

 too obscure to be readily recognized, and not more than 

 half a dozen forms are generally known in any one 

 locality."* 



*U. S. Dept. Agr. Farmers' Bulletin No. 5i. 



