Winter or summer, the crow lias his place in the prospect 



JIM CROW 



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THE American crow (Corvus americanus) is 

 the wisest of all our birds, the best able to 

 take care of himself under any and all cir- 

 cumstances, the most difficult to exterminate, and 

 yet the easiest to tame. He has, from the earliest 

 settlement of the country, been looked upon as a 

 pest, and his tribe has enriched our language with 

 the word scarecrow. Probably he was regarded as 

 a pest long before the advent of the Mayflower; the 

 squaws of the Six Nations doubtless shooed him 

 from their maize-plantings while Joseph was hoard- 

 ing corn in Egypt, and the braves of the Six Nations 

 affirmed that you never saw a crow when you had 

 your bow with you. He is still to-day regarded as 

 a pest, though in a lesser degree, for we have learned 

 that a coating of coal-tar over the seed-grain will 

 generally protect the corn-planting, and we have 

 learned that his fondness for wire worms, cutworms, 



