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grow, and in 1895 several low thickets had been thus formed ; the 

 mulberry-trees were stimulated by judicious trimming, and bore a 

 considerable crop of early fruit which ripened in advance of the 

 cherries, thus drawing the attention of the fruit-eating birds away 

 from the cherries, and serving to attract them to the vicinity of the 

 orchard. Ten nesting-boxes were put up for the wrens and blue- 

 birds ; but as the. bluebirds were very rare this season, none came 

 to the orchard. Two families of wrens, however, were reared in 

 the boxes in place of one family last year. Nesting materials — 

 strings, hair and straw — were hung in the trees and scattered 

 about. Several marauding cats were killed, and an attempt was 

 made to keep nest-hunting boys away from the neighborhood as 

 much as possible. Thirty-six nests of birds were discovered in the 

 neighborhood, as follows : — 



Three red-eyed vireos, ten robins, four Baltimore orioles, three 

 cuckoos, five chipping sparrows, three least flycatchers, two red- 

 starts, two yellow warblers, two chickadees, two house wrens. 



Of these all but three were destroyed, probably by boys, the 

 nests being torn down and the eggs missing. The three which 

 escaped destruction were two wrens' nests which had been built in 

 boxes upon buildings, and a robin's nest in a maple-tree within ten 

 feet of a chamber window. This wholesale destruction of nests 

 discouraged several pairs of birds, and they disappeared from the 

 neighborhood. Those remaining built new nests, and after a 

 second or third attempt a few succeeded in rearing young. One 

 nest of orioles escaped the general destruction, and the birds were 

 busy for a long time carrying canker-worms to their young. One 

 of them was noticed to take eleven canker-worms in its beak at 

 one time, and fly with them to the nest. The vireos, warblers, 

 chickadees, cuckoos, orioles and chipping sparrows were particu- 

 larly active in catching canker-worms, and the English sparrow 

 killed them in considerable numbers. 



If the thirty-six pairs of birds whose nests were found had suc- 

 ceeded in raising their young, it is probable that they would have 

 disposed of most of the canker-worms in the neighborhood. Five 

 thousand of these larvae are suflicient to strip a large apple-tree. 

 One hundred and eight young would have been reared, had each 

 pair of birds raised three. According to Professor Aughey's ex- 

 perience, sixty insects per day as food for each bird, both young 

 and old, would be a very low estimate.* Suppose each of these one 

 hundred and eight birds had received its sixty insects per day, there 

 would have been 6,480 caterpillars destroyed daily. The destruc- 

 tion of this number of caterpillars would be enough to save the 

 * Ist Rep. U. S. Ent. Com. 1877, p. 342. 



