274 An American Fruit-Farm 



to be destroyed by their own carelessness and 

 ignorance? 



Say what we please, our best friends are the 

 birds. The immeasurable loss to the country by 

 their wanton destruction could be avoided if we 

 would only let them alone. Eight hundred millions 

 a year! What are we going to do about it? Shall 

 we go on spraying tree, bush, and vine and shooting 

 birds? Shall we raise fruit only for worms — which 

 is precisely what we are doing all over the United 

 States. Consider the brutal facts of wanton 

 destruction of the birds, illustrated in the Lake 

 Shore Valley alone. In one part of that Valley 

 called North East, which comprises the north- 

 eastern corner of Erie County, Pennsylvania, 

 there were about seven thousand acres of fruit in 

 19 1 2, but this was so badly injured by insects that 

 the result was as if there were only thirty-two 

 hundred acres. This means that scores of fruit- 

 growers paid taxes, worked, or tried to work 

 thirty-eight hundred acres of fruit not merely for 

 nothing, but as a breeding ground for worms to vex 

 them another year. Nor is the Valley exceptional; 

 a like folly reigns in other valleys. Consider this 

 folly as a common procedure. In a region favored 

 by Nature for the production of a great variety of 

 finest fruit, men produce worms! Foolishly they 

 do all they can to defeat Nature and to injure 

 themselves. They kill their best friends and at the 

 same time expend thousands of dollars to make 

 artificial friends ; they imagine that spraying will 



