STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 25 



young which looked Hke little chickens with hooked beaks. 

 Later the young had a little gray coming in the white plumage, 

 and still later, when ready to go out into the world, they were 

 gray all over. All that summer those owls stayed there. They 

 killed only one or two small birds. They killed several blue- 

 jays and quantities of mice and noxious insects, and the next 

 year we had more small birds than ever before. The mice 

 formerly had destroyed the birds, so by killing bluejays and 

 mice these owls kept the enemies of the small birds away from 

 them to a certain extent. So long as we kept those owls we 

 never had a fruit tree troubled by mice. 



I went down to a neighbor's one day and he said to me, "A 

 pair of chickadees are looking my house all over. What do 

 you think they want." "O," I said, "probably they were reared 

 in a nesting box at my house, and they are looking for a bird 

 house here." I went to the dump and picked up a two quart 

 tin can and made it ready and put it in the tree, and these chick- 

 adees took it in twenty minutes. Later my neighbor put up 

 other cans and they were all used sooner or later by birds or 

 squirrels. There was in a little box a chickadee's nest at my 

 kitchen window made entirely of cotton that we put in. The 

 birds merely dug a hole in the cotton, put in one feather and 

 there was the nest ; and soon the mother bird was sitting on the 

 eggs. I think those little birds took as much interest in our 

 housekeeping as we did in theirs, for they watched the dish 

 washing and everything of that sort for a long time every day. 

 Now, what I want to call your attention to is this : By putting 

 up boxes we increased those chickadees so that where the first 

 year we had one nest and one brood of five, the third year we 

 had three nests and two broods in each nest, with from seven to 

 nine in each brood. And the result on the trees was something 

 remarkable. We did not have to spray our trees about the house 

 for ten years while we protected the birds there. People will 

 tell you that the birds will not eat the hairy caterpillars. We 

 rarely found many caterpillar nests through our orchard. One 

 year there was one left and we thought the birds were not going 

 to take it but the last time I saw it, when I thought I would take 

 it off, I went to lunch and when I came back it was torn open. 

 The birds had taken the caterpillars out and they were nearly 

 all dead on the ground or eaten. The birds kill a good many by 



