186 Elementary Principles of Agriculture 



watch the many kinds of birds in your neighborhood, 

 and see how they catch their food. The scissor-tails 

 capture the insects that fly during the day. At night 

 the whippoorwills and night-hawks begin to fly, and 

 catch the insects that the day-flying birds miss. Some 

 kinds of birds, like the wren and vireos, go carefully from 

 leaf to leaf, looking for the small, half-hidden insects 

 on the under sides. Still, again, the busy woodpecker 

 goes over the bark looking for insect eggs and larvae, 

 or boring for ants and wood-worms. Other birds, like 

 the larks and sparrows, scan the ground for creeping 

 insects, while still others, with long legs and bills, go to 

 the bottom of the pool for the little swimmers that are 

 seemingly safe from molestation. 



254a. If a bird eats on an average one hundred insects a day, 

 and there are three birds to every acre of land, how many insects 

 will they eat in a year? How many insects would they take from 

 the largest orchard in the neighborhood? 



254b. A quail was found to have 10,000 weed and grass seeds 

 in the craw when killed. If each quail in a covey of fifteen should 

 destroy this many weed seeds daily for a year, how many weeds 

 would be destroyed? 



255. Change of Feeding Habits in Migration. Some 

 birds that spend a part of a season in one part of the 

 country, and the other in a distant section, change 

 their feeding habits. A good illustration is the bobolink, 

 or rice bird. It breeds in the North, and feeds largely 

 on insects, and but slightly on grain. In the South it is 

 called "rice bird" because it prefers the rice field, 

 where 50 to 80 per cent of its food is rice. 



256. Bird-houses. Instead of shooting at birds, 

 and throwing stones to scare them, we should encourage 

 the useful birds to build their nests around the barns 

 and in the orchards. Many persons build houses to 



