UTILITY OP BIRDS. 69 



been made, cither to banish tlicm, or to extirpate the breed. 

 But whenever this measure has been carried into effect, the 

 most serious injury to corn and other crops has invariably 

 followed, from the unchecked devastations of the grub and the 

 caterpillar." 



An intelligent observer in Virginia, calling himself an aged 

 man, communicated some important information to the 

 " Southern Planter " in 1860, respecting the services of birds. 

 He remarks that since his boyhood, there has been a rapid 

 decrease in the number of birds, and a proportional increase of 

 insects. Among the consequences of this multiplication, he 

 mentions destructive depredations upon the farmer's crops, by 

 clover-worms, wire-worms, cut-worms, and on the wheat crops 

 particularly by chinch-bugs, Hessian flies, joint-worms and 

 other pests. He thinks it demonstrable that the excessive 

 multiplication of these injurious insects is due to the scarcity 

 of birds. He speaks particularly of the diminution of wood- 

 peckers as a public calamity. He has known a community of 

 red-headed woodpeckers to actually arrest the progress of 

 destruction from borers in a pine forest. He mentions the 

 large-spotted woodpecker, called in New England the flicker, 

 as the only bird he ever saw pulling out worms from the roots 

 of peach trees. Such a habit must cause the destruction of 

 millions of orchard borers, which are mostly found near the 

 roots of trees. 



The Abbe St. Pierre remarks : " There are insects, noxious 

 in their nature, that prey upon our fruits and our corn. But 

 if snails, May-bugs, caterpillars and locusts ravage our plains, 

 it is because we destroy the birds of our groves that live upon 

 them ; and because when importing the trees of foreign coun- 

 tries into our own, we import at the same time the eggs of the 

 insects which they harbor, while the birds of the same climate 

 — the destroyers of those insects — are left behind. Every 

 country has birds peculiar to itself for the preservation of its 

 plants. I have seen at the Cape of Good Hope, a species 

 called the gardener's bird, incessantly employed in destroying 

 the worms and caterpillars, which, as he caught them, he 

 stuck on the thorny prickles of the bushes. I have likewise 

 seen in the Isle of France, a species of starling, called the 

 martin, that comes from India, and lives on locusts and other 



