112 Wild Bird Guests 



cheerful presence alone has won for them the 

 love of every American capable of the finer 

 feelings. Nevertheless many of them are very 

 useful as well. The bluebird, universal favorite, 

 has a splendid record as a destroyer of injuri- 

 ous insects. Professor Forbes, in summing up 

 his evidence for this bird, remarks: "One hun- 

 dred bluebirds at thirty insects a day, would eat 

 in eight months about 670,000 insects. If this 

 number of birds were destroyed, the result would 

 be the preservation, on the area supervised by 

 them, of about seventy thousand moths and 

 caterpillars (many of them cutworms), twenty 

 thousand leaf hoppers, ten thousand curculios, 

 and sixty-five thousand crickets, locusts, and 

 grasshoppers. How this frightful horde of ma- 

 rauders would busy itself if left undisturbed, 

 no one can doubt. It would eat grass and clover, 

 and corn and cabbage, inflicting an immense 

 injury itself, and leaving a progeny which would 

 multiply that injury indefinitely." 



The robin is charged with eating ripe fruit and 

 there is no doubt whatever that in many cases 

 the charge is true. At times owners of small 

 fruit farms suffer severe losses from the attacks 

 of this bird, though the investigations of Pro- 

 fessor Beal tend to show that where wild fruit 

 is abundant it is preferred to the cultivated 



