What Birds Do for Us 



protection adopted by many caterpillars. Most birds 

 will not touch the hairy kind. But cuckoos are not 

 so fastidious. The walls of their stomachs are some- 

 times as closely coated with hairs as a gentleman's 

 beaver hat. Caterpillars are also the most important 

 item on the Baltimore oriole's bill of fare, of which 

 eighty-three per cent is insect food gleaned among 

 the foliage of trees. Click beetles, which infest 

 every kind of cultivated plant, and their larvae, 

 known as wire -worms, destroy millions of dollars' 

 worth of farm produce every year. Now, there are 

 over five hundred species of them in North America, 

 and the oriole, which eats them as a staple and 

 demolishes very many other kinds of beetles, wasps, 

 bugs, plant-lice, craneflies, grasshoppers, locusts, and 

 spiders, should win opinions as golden as his feathers 

 for this benefaction alone. It has been said that were 

 all the insects to perish, all the flowers would perish 

 too, which is not half so true as that were all the 

 birds to perish men would speedily follow them. 

 At the end of ten years the insects, unchecked, 

 would have eaten every green thing off the earth ! 



THE BIRDS THAT HAVE CHARGE OF THE BARK 



For obvious reasons, then, many crawling insects 

 hide themselves under the scaly bark of trees or in 

 holes laboriously tunneled in decaying wood ; others 

 deposit their eggs in such secret places. When they 

 die a natural death at the close of summer it is with 

 the happy delusion that the next generation of their 

 species, sleeping in embryo, is perfectly safe. But 

 see how long it takes a woodpecker to eat a hundred 



179 



