No. 4.] BIRDS USEFUL TO AGRICULTURE. 51 



tion were being robbed by crows and jays. Hence we may 

 conclude that if crows are allowed to increase too rapidly 

 they may do much harm. Still, those who regard the crow 

 as an evil must certainly admit that it is a necessary evil, 

 where grubs, caterpillars or grasshoppers become numerous. 

 The blue jay is a sad rascal, no doubt. It has a great 

 appetite for grain and fruit, and destroys some birds' eggs. 

 On the other hand, it is a noted caterpillar hunter, and is 

 one of the few birds that eat the eggs of the tent caterpillar 

 and other harmful insects in winter. As this bird remains 

 in Massachusetts most of the winter, it must do a vast 

 amount of good unnoticed during the colder months of the 

 year, when it can do little harm. 



The Starlings and Blackbirds. 

 The members of this family are, as a rule, highly bene- 

 ficial to agriculture. The bobolink and some of the black- 

 birds are rightly considered great pests in the southern rice 

 fields ; the redwings and crow blackbirds, when too numer- 

 ous at any point for their normal food supply, do much 

 injury in grain fields, especially among Indian corn. But 

 the amount of grain eaten by each bird for the season is of 

 little consequence, compared with the enormous number of 

 insects it destroys. The difficulty is in this case that the 

 good the birds do is distributed unnoticed over a wide region 

 and through many months of each year ; while the harm done 

 is confined to a few months and to more limited areas, and so 

 attracts much more attention. The injury is largely done in 

 the fall, when, the breeding season being over, the birds 

 collect in immense flocks. Where these flocks descend upon 

 the grain fields, the farmers whose crops so sufier receive 

 little consolation from the fact that the birds that have 

 destroyed their grain have but recently been rendering price- 

 less service to their neighbors or to other farmers over a 

 wide stretch of territory. It seems hard for the southern 

 rice planter to be obliged to pay the bobolinks and black- 

 birds from his fields the price they exact for protecting 

 from the ravages of insect pests the grain fields, grass crops 

 and gardens of the north. Here the bobolink is one of the 

 most useful birds. It remains here during the breeding 



