OTHER FRIENDS OF THE GARDEN 



329 



Birds eat weed seeds. Birds also help us in our gar- 

 dens by eating weed seeds ; especially beneficial are our 

 native sparrows (not the English sparrow), the bobwhite, 

 the mourning dove, and others. Those birds which stay 

 with us late in the fall often devour great numbers of weed 

 seeds, which are thus prevented from sprouting and grow- 

 ing the following year. Sometimes birds, such as owls, 

 eat rats, field mice, and other pests. We should all band 

 together to prevent the destruction of our native birds, 



and to encourage 



nesting in the 

 trees and shrubs 

 around us. House 

 cats, and more 

 often stray cats, 

 are of great harm, 

 because they 

 either kill or 

 frighten away the 

 birds and prevent 

 them from nest- 

 ing in the neigh- 

 borhood. 



Other friends of the garden. We do not think of a 

 toad as being a beautiful animal, but every boy and girl 

 who keeps a garden should have a friendly toad living under 

 one of the big-leaved plants in it. Toads have been found 

 to eat no less than eighty-three different kinds of insects, 

 most of which are injurious. A single toad has been esti- 

 mated by Kirkland, on account of the cutworms which 

 it might kill, to be worth nearly twenty dollars a season, 

 if the damage done by each cutworm were estimated at 



The common toad, an insect eater. 



