48 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1898. 



easy afterwards. He walks about very leisurely in the grass. 

 The flight is peculiar, a very beautiful hovering flight, a little 

 soaring like the hawk perhaps, and as it flies it shows two very 

 distinct white tail feathers. Then it has a fine song, it is a 

 rather piercing note perhaps and in a manner strained, but it is 

 one of the sweet notes of the springtime. 



The two Orioles, the Orchard and the Baltimore, are very 

 valuable. Both have an undisputed reputation as destroyers of 

 insects. They eat about equally perhaps great numbers of 

 caterpillars, the tent caterpillar among others, and bugs, grass- 

 hoppers and beetles that feed upon the locust and the apple 

 trees. Then the Baltimore eats the wire-worm and the larvas 

 of the elaters. They are vegetable feeders and live upon the 

 roots of grass, wheat, corn, potatoes and garden vegetables. 

 Generally their eggs are laid in pastures and on the ground 

 where the surface is undisturbed or in the vicinity of rotten 

 wood. The wire-worms are very hard to kill, so that we should 

 be most grateful to the l)irds that destroy them. The Oriole is 

 a favorite of poets and people in general. A story is told that 

 Lord Baltimore — the first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert — was 

 so pleased and cheered by the presence of the large number of 

 these birds in the trees of Maryland, that he adopted their colors, 

 the black and yellow of the Oriole. 



The Crow Blackbird or the Purple Grackle is very common 

 here. The Purple Grackle has a purple irridescence all over 

 the plumage, while with this variety that we have here, the 

 colored purple irridescence comes oft' quite early and the rest of 

 the plumage has a brown slatish appearance. These are common 

 birds in pine trees, and we often find them walking about on the 

 ground. In the West they are very troublesome, going there 

 as they do in great flocks of thousands. There they do a great 

 deal of damage to the grain crops, but we have no such trouble 

 from them here and they often follow the plough over the fields 

 and afterward when their stomachs are examined they are found 

 to be crammed with the grubs which they have picked up. Then 

 they eat a great many destructive insects — the rose beetle, May 

 beetle, grasshoppers, caterpillars, crickets, and locusts. 



