32 



pipe hole, built their nest and laid their eggs in the space be- 

 tween the outer boarding and the wainscoting. When the 

 young were hatched it was noted that the parent birds were 

 bringing caterpillars of the brown-tail moth and the gypsy 

 moth to their young. There were no such caterpillars in the 

 immediate vicinity of the house, so the birds were watched and 

 were seen to bring them from an ancient apple tree in a pasture 

 some distance away. They practically cleared this tree of these 

 destructive insects before their food campaign for their family 

 was over. 1 



Dr. Walter E. Collinge, the eminent British economic orni- 

 thologist, writing of the caterpillar of the currant or magpie 

 moth, asserts that it requires about 170 of these to weigh an 

 ounce. In their early stages about 200 will aggregate that 

 weight. He says that he has seen currant plantations infested 

 with them, and by counting the number to a bush has estimated 

 nearly 1,000,000 to a plantation, or a total of 2^ hundred- 

 weight. Had such a horde been left undisturbed they would 

 quickly have consumed all the foliage and ruined the crop, but 

 thanks to the birds that attacked them they were reduced to 

 innocuous numbers long before they had an opportunity of 

 devastating the plantation. 2 



The forest tent caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria), a first-class 

 forest pest, is eaten by many birds. Miss Mary B. Sherman 

 of Ogdensburg, New York, wrote on May 18, 1900, that the 

 town was then full of birds, and they were doing good work 

 feeding on the forest tent caterpillar. She noted sparrows, 

 warblers, cuckoos, robins and cedar waxwings attacking these 

 larvae. On May 26 she wrote that there were practically no 

 caterpillars left. They hatched in large numbers, but cold 

 weather evidently killed many, and the birds appeared to have 

 destroyed the remainder. 3 



Even the very hairy tussock-moth caterpillar (Hemerocampa 

 leucostigma) has a number of bird enemies. Dr. Sterling of 

 Cleveland, Ohio, said that in the summer of 1880 the elms along 

 Euclid Avenue in his vicinity were attacked by these cater- 

 pillars. Thousands were destroyed by the people in the 



1 Bulletin, Massachusetts Audubon Society, Vol. I, No. 9, January, 1918, p. 7. 



* Agricultural Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 7, May, 1919, p. 126. 



3 Felt, E. P.: Sixteenth Annual Report, New York State Entomologist, 1901, p. 1019. 



