638 DOMESTIC ANIMALS, DAIRYING, ETC. 



Eable of germinating after being long buried in the soil. As weeds 

 ave been estimated annually to damage crop land on the average 

 about a dollar per acre, and as the lands under crop in the United 

 States in 1899 were 290,000,000 acres, the good work accomplished 

 by the sparrows is of very great value to the farmer. Without their 

 aid the cost of fighting weeds would be vastly increased, and no 

 doubt in places profitable agriculture would be almost impossible. 



Some of the sparrow tribe, as the purple finch and grosbeak, are 

 fond of buds, and in spring may be frequently seen in apple, cherry, 

 peach, and other trees, greedily eating the buds or the stamens of the 

 blossoms. No doubt a certain percentage of fruit is lost through the 

 agency of these birds, but budding by birds in iteelf, if not carried 

 too far, is by no means objectionable ; and neither of the birds men- 

 tioned, nor any native bird that shares the habit, is numerous 

 enough (except in California) or sufficiently confirmed in the habit 

 to seriously reduce the fruit crop. Indeed budding by hand to pre- 

 vent overbearing and to improve the size and quality of fruit is a 

 common practice, and it is probable that, as stated above, in most 

 cases no actual loss of profit follows budding by our native birds. 

 Whether so or not, the purple finch destroys many insects, cater- 

 pillars among them, and hence earns favor in the eyes of the farmer; 

 while a still stronger case may be made out for the rose-breasted 

 grosbeak, which is a most determined foe of the Colorado beetle, and 

 probably destroys more of these dreaded insects than does any other 

 bird possibly than do all other birds combined. The insects eaten 

 by the old birds, however, are but a tithe of the number they feed to 

 their young, for nestlings thrive best and grow faster on a diet com- 

 posed almost exclusively of insects. 



Until the English sparrow was introduced it would have been 

 safe to say that all the sparrows were friends of the farmer and de- 

 served protection at his hands. Unlike our native species, however, 

 this bird has bad habits far outweighing any possible good that it 

 does, even if the most liberal estimate be made of the comparatively 

 small number of insects that it destroys or the weed seed it eats. It is 

 a conspicuous member of the seed-eating group, as its structure abun- 

 dantly proves, and this well-known fact should have prevented its 

 introduction into the United States to perform the service of an insect 

 eater. By preference the bird is a scavenger of the city streets. Out- 

 side the city the bird's fondness for seeds does not stop with weed seed. 

 The smaller grains are liable to attack at all stages of growth, from 

 sowing time to harvest, and the total damage to the grain crop of the 

 country inflicted by this pest at the present time amounts to many 

 thousands of dollars annually. 



This sparrow, like some of our native species, is fond^of the buds 

 of fruit trees. Where it exists in small numbers the injury it does 

 in this way, like that of our own sparrows, is too small to count much 

 against it ; but the bird is very prolific and in many suburban towns 

 its colonies are so large that the resulting damage it inflicts upon 

 fruit trees in spring is very great. It is fond also of all the small 



