Birds and the Fruit-Farm 275 



take the place of insect-eating birds. Nonsense! 

 Nature knows more than we. Consider the facts. 

 The coddling moth costs America annually $12,000,- 

 000 by destruction of fruit and $8,500,000 ad- 

 ditional for spraying bill. Is that good business? 

 One pair of potato bugs will breed 55,000,000 

 potato bugs in one season. One pair of green leaf- 

 lice will breed ten sextillion lice in one season. 

 Try to write ten sextillion and see what sort of a 

 figure you have! A pair of gypsy-moths busy all 

 summer will produce upwards of five trillion worms 

 to feed on orchard and other trees. 



Nature provides a check on these and like pests — 

 the birds. And who kills the birds? Do you who 

 are a fruit-farmer? Do you allow the killing of 

 them on your premises? What will a bird do for 

 us if we let him and his mate alone? A pair of 

 grosbeaks in course of the day visited the nest 

 four hundred and fifty times and each time with 

 two or more worms. Sparrows, chickadees, mar- 

 tins, vireos, average a visit every minute to the 

 nest, and two or more worms each visit. A night- 

 hawk's crop contained sixty grasshoppers ; another's 

 five hundred mosquitoes; a blackbird's thirty- 

 eight black cutworms, the meanest worm for 

 tomatoes, cabbages, strawberries, and the garden 

 generally. And in 19 12 there were more cut- 

 worms and fewer blackbirds in the Valley than ever 

 before in its history. One song-sparrow devours 

 more than fifteen hundred worms in one day, and 

 this cheeriest of songsters, who abides with us the 



