STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 1 5 



and the meadow lark with young in the nest is worth four or 

 five dollars a year to the farmer because of the grass-eating 

 insects which the little family consumes. All the birds of the 

 field are beneficial in the same way. They feed on the insects 

 which destroy the grass, and were it not for these birds you 

 would soon have no grass crop. Let me give you evidence in 

 support of this statement. Whenever I speak to farmers about 

 the crow, every time I open my mouth I put my foot in it, for 

 no matter what I say they disagree with me. I know of one 

 old farmer who got up in a meeting of the Massachusetts State 

 Board of Agriculture and asked that a bounty be put on crows. 

 Some one said, "If you put a bounty on crows in this state, 

 they will bring dead ones in from other states and collect bounty 

 on them." The farmer said, "That would be a blessing. Kill 

 them all ! I would like to wring the neck of the last crow in 

 Massachusetts." Many feel like that, but the crow is a neces- 

 sary evil. In the decade of 1740-50 in all the New England 

 colonies bounties were paid on crows by every town clerk, and 

 crows and blackbirds were so slaughtered that by the year 

 1749 they were nearly all gone. Then a grass famine occurred 

 and the farmers of Massachusetts and Maine and all these New 

 England colonies had to send to England and Pennsylvania to 

 get hay enough to carry their cattle through the winter, because, 

 as the people believed, the cut worms, grasshoppers, locusts and 

 other grass insects increased so much as a consequence of the 

 destruction of these birds. There never has been a general 

 bounty paid on crows since. If the crow is doing harm kill him, 

 if you can, but do not exterminate the crow. 



I believe that birds are just as necessary in the woods as they 

 are in the fields. I have lived eight years of my life in the 

 woods and have watched the birds night and morning, spring 

 and summer, fall and winter and if you could see what I have 

 seen it would surprise you. I have seen a scarlet tanager come to 

 a bush and take every caterpillar off it. I have seen a little flock 

 of kinglets come to a pine grove, stay there all winter, and clean 

 off the eggs of the plant lice from those trees so that no plant 

 lice could be seen the next year. Many other things of that 

 kind I have seen, — birds coming in the spring and staying until 

 'the fall and destroying all kinds of destructive tree insects. 

 Where the birds have been killed off the trees have been stripped 



