io8 Wild Bird Guests 



judge him solely from an economic standpoint. 

 It is hard for people of the north, where the bird 

 is so well-beloved for aesthetic reasons, to hear 

 him condemned, but the fact remains that his 

 depredations in the rice fields of the south are 

 often very serious. In the fall the bobolinks 

 gather in flocks of millions, which move like 

 armies upon the rice crops, which they would 

 destroy in two or three days if they were not 

 continually being driven off by "bird-minders" 

 who patrol the fields, and slaughter the birds 

 by shooting them. 



Sparrows and finches base their chief claim to 

 usefulness upon the fact that they are, as a family, 

 the greatest destroyers of the seeds of noxious 

 weeds. They help to keep down perhaps fifty or 

 sixty kinds of injurious plants, and the amount 

 of good they accomplish in the course of a year is 

 hard to believe. Many of them, like the juncos, 

 tree sparrows, and snow buntings, work in flocks, 

 and before them such seeds as ragweed, pigweed, 

 smartweed, and crab grass fairly melt away from 

 the ground. It is not an uncommon thing to 

 find from 300 to 500 seeds in the stomach of a 

 single sparrow, and these represent but a part 

 of the day's work. Prof. F. E. L. Beal some 

 time ago made a very careful and conservative 

 estimate of the number of tree sparrows which 



