104 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



Purple Martins. 

 Dr. B. H. Warren writes me from West Chester, Pennsyl- 

 vania, that purple martins there pluck green leaves from pear 

 trees and sometimes from sour cherry trees, and use these 

 leaves for nest building. He has a colony of about 40 birds 

 in a house of 24 rooms, and they have stripped two branches 

 of a pear tree so that they are noticeably bare. This habit 

 probably is a local one, as I have never seen a notice of it 

 anywhere or noted it in Massachusetts. 



Robins. 

 Wilfrid Wheeler, secretary of the Massachusetts State Board 

 of Agriculture, complains that in the fall of this year robins 

 mutilated and ruined many of his grapes at Concord. I have 

 not heard of this habit elsewhere, and my own grapes were 

 untouched, although robins were numerous in September. 



Warblers. 



During the past two seasons the Cape May warbler has been 

 seen to peck and ruin grapes in several localities, and Dr. War- 

 ren writes me that the Tennessee warbler also has this habit, 

 and that he recently took one in Pennsylvania that was eating 

 a ripe seckel pear hanging on a tree. These birds, however, 

 are so rare in Massachusetts that any injury they may do here 

 will never be noticeable, and probably it is not very serious 

 anywhere. 



Starlings. 



Complaints continue to come in to the effect that starlings 

 destroy apples and pears as well as cherries. 



Ruffed Grouse. 

 Victor Asp writes to know what can be done when the ruffed 

 grouse eats the leaf buds of the apple trees in the winter. My 

 experience has been that such destrux2tion of leaf buds, which also 

 includes fruit buds, makes for the production of better fruit. 

 It usually results in a mere thinning of buds, which tends 

 toward fewer leaves and fewer but larger apples, and rather 



