No. 4.] REPORT OF STATE ORNITHOLOGIST. 265 



trees on his estate cut, and the caterpillars did very little 

 harm there because he had made his place attractive to native 

 birds. In the fall of 1913, however, many tent caterpillar 

 moths deposited their eggs on his trees, but in late November, 

 when he examined the trees, he found that birds, presumably 

 chickadees, had removed nearly all the egg clusters. 



Mr. B. A. x\ruold, who summers at Northeast Harbor, Me., 

 writes that in that vicinity and in many places in Maine the 

 spruce worm ^ has become quite abundant, so much so that 

 people are beginning to fear the destruction of the spruce. 

 Warblers and titmice feed voraciously on these insects, but 

 Mr. Arnold says that the red squirrels, which are becoming 

 abundant in the Maine woods, protect the moths by destroy- 

 ing the eggs and young of the warblers and other small birds 

 which feed on insects. For example, he states that his cot- 

 tage is situated on a point extending into the sea and con- 

 nected to the mainland by a somewhat narrow neck. The 

 point is covered with spruce trees, and the worms and moths 

 were quite abundant on the point in June. Knowing that 

 the squirrels destroyed the warblers' eggs and young he had 

 the squirrels killed off, and several families of young warblers 

 were reared in a short time and the spruce trees were cleared 

 of worms and moths. At almost any time of the day one 

 could look out and see the little warblers flying from limb to 

 limb in search of their food. In confirmation of his belief he 

 states that there are several small islands in the Georgian 

 Bay, Lake Huron, on which warblers nest very abundantly. 

 These islands are very small and squirrels do not find food 

 enough to live there. On one island of hardly an acre there 

 are apparently from six to ten pairs of warblers nesting, 

 whereas on the mainland, only a few hundred feet away, 

 where the vegetation and nesting conditions are practically 

 identical, it is hard to find any. 



The Killing of Birds by Immigraxts. 

 Recently it has been reported that some immigrants make 

 a practice of taking young birds from their nests for food. 

 Evidence of this has at last been obtained. Mr. Wilbur 



I The larvae of several species of Tortricid moths are destructive to the spruces at times. 



