Canadian Forestrij Journal, June, 1917 1151 



4 



Nature's Warfare in Field and Forest 



Ellen R. C. Webber, Port Haney, B.C. 



The World Would Last Three Years If 

 Animal Vigilantes Were Overmastered. 



THE greatest enemy man has to fear is the insect life of the world. You 

 are all more or less acquainted with the ravages of grasshoppers, the 

 devastating march of the locusts, and the work of the destructive and 

 ever dreaded "seventeen-year beetle." You have read of them, or experienced 

 them to a certain degree. 



I, myself, have seen in Wyoming, the "Army Locust" on his marsh across 

 the grass-lands, when the train upon which I was traveling was held up for 

 nearly three hours while the vast, greedy, greasy army was crossing the 

 R. R. tracks. No wheel, depending upon its grip on steel, could make head- 

 way through the crushed, oily bodies. 



In solid mass, half a mile in width, they crept leisurely on; and as far 

 as the eye could see on either side of our steel roadway, they were coming, and 

 going; and the land they had passed over was left bare of any vegetation. 



We know that a farm of green grain or of corn, beautiful in the morning 

 and ready for the harvesters' early coming, is, by a sudden raid of grass- 

 hoppers, but barren land at sunset; with labor, investment and hope all dead 

 loss; as is the devoured crop. 



Here in our own neighborhood you see the stripped gooseberry bushes; 

 the eaten, dying leaves of some tree; the pale, yellowy green of some sickly 

 appearing plant or shrub; all the result of the ravenous appetites of insect 

 pests. 



Our fruit trees are eaten through and through with the larvae of insects; 

 the bark is sucked dry of its juices by tiny insects; the fruit injured and made 

 valueless by their depredations. In the forests timber is destroyed; young 

 trees killed; and in the garden our vegetables and flowers are attacked and 

 lost; and insect life, in some form or stage, is the direct cause of our trouble. 



World Would Last Three Years 



It has been estimated by those who give this question study and thought 

 leading into actual statistics, that, were there no friends allied by nature, 

 in the great struggle between man and his enemy insects, that in three years 

 time there would be no life left on the earth; — vegetation would disappear 

 first, and animal life would accompany and follow it. 



Yet, daily, these tiny, allied soldiers of ours, to whom we owe our very 

 existence; little soldiers recruited and trained by Almighty God for our 



