116 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [P. D. 4. 



do not apply to native birds. The United States government 

 now wisely prohibits the importation of foreign birds for libera- 

 tion here. 



The Nesting-box Campaign. 



The campaign to induce Massachusetts manufacturers to 

 make and sell inexpensive nesting boxes and bird houses and to 

 influence people to make them and put them up goes briskly on. 

 Hundreds if not thousands of nesting boxes and bird houses 

 have been made and erected by school children. In some cases 

 this work has been encouraged by teachers. Most manufac- 

 turers soon tire of the business of making nesting boxes as it is 

 not profitable, but Winthrop Packard of Canton sells about 

 10,000 paroid boxes a year, and several other Massachusetts 

 manufacturers dispose of a lesser number of wooden boxes an- 

 nually. Now comes John C. Lee of Wellesley, a public-spirited 

 citizen, if ever there was one, who induces manufacturers to 

 make nesting boxes and feeding appliances by the thousand 

 at the lowest possible rates, and then turns them over to the 

 public at cost; also he furnishes plans, patterns and specifica- 

 tions so that any one can make these boxes. Mr. Lee has 

 become convinced by his experience in attracting birds on his 

 own estate that they render efiicient assistance in destroying 

 insect pests, and he is doing missionary work to spread the 

 idea of bird protection. He has observed chickadees eating the 

 eggs of the gypsy moth upon his trees. Plate I. shows some 

 egg clusters of this moth when first attacked by chickadees, and 

 others where the birds have destroyed all the eggs, leaving only 

 a thin coating of the yellow covering hairs attached to the bark. 

 This is not a new discovery, as I have already reported the 

 chickadee, the downy woodpecker and nuthatches as feeding on 

 these eggs,^ and about 50 species of birds are known to destroy 

 other forms of this moth; but the experience of Mr. Lee in- 

 dicates that the habit of eating these eggs is spreading among 

 the birds, as it had not been noticed previously in the region 

 about Wellesley. 



Mr. Lee has experimented with nesting boxes similar to some 

 advocated in my previous reports, and has improved upon 



1 Annual reports of the State Ornithologist for 1910 and 1911. 



