314 An American Fruit-Farm 



of all the birds in America. They are plain, 

 homely, noisy, sociable creatures, chiefly feeding 

 on the seeds of weeds. A single tree-sparrow is 

 said to consume one ounce of weed-seed a day. 4 

 This means, in a State as large as Pennsylvania, 

 the consumption of more than six hundred and 

 fifty tons of weed-seed each year by the tree- 

 sparrow alone, and there are many other varieties 

 of this active family in the Commonwealth. Shall 

 we kill sparrows and raise weeds, or kill weeds by 

 protecting the sparrows? The blue jay is always 

 after the brown-tail moth, the extent of whose 

 ravages cannot be estimated in money. The blue 

 jay is Nattire's specific for this most destructive 

 moth. Which shall we have, fruit trees, shade 

 trees, and the blue jay, or no blue jay and no trees? 

 But there are animals that wear trousers and carry 

 guns who — ? and after the gun, — a dead blue jay! 

 Bobolinks? Down South the rice-planters con- 

 demn them; up North, away from the rice-fields, 

 the bird develops an insatiable appetite for all 

 sorts of harmful insects. Here at the North we 

 must say, ''Let somebody else kill the bobolink; 

 we need him.'* 



Crows? Yes, a good friend, the crow. Grass- 

 hoppers, cutworms, meadow-mice, countless num- 

 bers of these do the crows destroy. After a very 

 careful hearing, and the jury out a long time — out 

 indeed for years, — ^the verdict, as reported by 

 Uncle Sam, in the celebrated case of ''The People 

 of the United States vs, the Crow,'* is: "The 



