STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. I7 



see what it would come to in a few years if these animals were 

 not held in check. 



Wherever the hawks and owls have been entirely killed off 

 field mice have increased so that they have eaten up everything 

 green on the face of the earth, taken away the pasturage of 

 the cattle and left the country without a green thing in it. And 

 there is no hope and no help for such an irruption of mice as 

 that until a flight of hawks and owls comes along and cleans 

 them up. 



The owls are the target of ignorance and superstition and 

 have been since the dawn of history, but among them are some 

 of the most useful of birds. Our two large owls, the Barred 

 Owl and the Great Horned Owl, however, kill some game and 

 poultry. I will tell you more about the smaller owls later. 



The spotted sandpiper, a very useful bird, is one which we 

 should never kill, because it feeds on insects in the grass, the 

 corn field and the cabbage field. At the present time they are 

 protected by a national law, but up to within a few years people 

 have been allowed to shoot them most of the year ; even in the 

 summer when the little young birds were running about unable 

 to fly, in most of the states the law has allowed the gunner to 

 kill them. 



The sandpipers or peeps of the seashore are also useful to the 

 western farmer, feeding especially on grass insects in the inte- 

 rior. In the fall they go south, along the Atlantic coast. 



The smaller herons are not very handsome but are useful. 

 They feed on fish and the insects of the low ground, such as 

 the low land grasshoppers and the army worm, which if they 

 are not held in check will march into the uplands and destroy 

 the crops, as they have all over the eastern country largely this 

 year. Dr. Gaumer tells us that all along the coast of Yucatan 

 and Mexico, where herons and other littoral birds have been 

 killed off, disease has increased among the inhabitants. No one 

 knows why, but some people believe it is because these birds, 

 which were killed for millinery purposes, formerly fed on the 

 larvae of the yellow fever and malarial mosquitoes and so saved 

 the inhabitants from a certain amount of disease. 



The gulls of the seashore are scavengers. They pick up dead 

 fish and decaying matter along the shore, and the garbage that is 

 thrown out, and keep it from floating in on the beaches. The 



