1916 | Bryant: Habits and Food of the Roadrunner 45 
erickets, wireworms, and hairy caterpillars. The regular consumption 
of such large numbers of grasshoppers by roadrunners must in some 
measure affect the abundance of the insect. The increase or decrease 
in the numbers taken by the roadrunner according to whether the 
insect is scarce or plentiful makes it probable that this bird, wherever 
it is found, acts as one of the checks on grasshopper abundance. 
* and black 
crickets, although of less economic importance, are classified as in- 
Jerusalem crickets, commonly known as ‘‘potato bugs,’ 
jurious insects. Wireworms are important insect pests in cultivated 
fields, and their destruction by natural enemies is to be encouraged 
rather than discouraged. Artificial means of destroying wireworms 
are limited and the work of birds is therefore more potent. As there 
are practically no vertebrate enemies of hairy caterpillars, and since 
to this group of caterpillars belong many destructive larvae, their 
systematic destruction by the roadrunner goes far towards establish- 
ing it among those birds to be classed as beneficial. Add the possible 
benefit conferred through the destruction of small rodent pests, and 
the evidence in favor of protecting the bird exceeds the evidence 
against it. 
Economic ornithologists have many times called attention to the 
fact that so far as apparent results are concerned the work of birds 
in destroying insects is not so effective as an artificial method such 
as the use of an insecticide. True it is, also, that birds less often 
attack those injurious insects for the control of which large amounts 
of money are spent than those which must be classified as of minor 
importance. For instance, here in California, according to statistics 
compiled by the Agricultural Experiment Station, about nineteen 
times as much money is spent each year on the control of black and 
other scales, phylloxera and codling moth, as is spent on all other 
insects combined. Hence the commonest insects eaten by birds— 
grasshoppers, cutworms and caterpillars, and wireworms—are of much 
less economic importance and their destruction by birds appears to 
be of less significance. Nevertheless, many of the workings of nature 
are still beyond our knowledge and we are constantly finding out that 
artificial methods are usually inferior to natural ones. May it not 
be that the very reason why such insects as grasshoppers, cutworms, 
and wireworms are of minor importance is that they are better con- 
trolled by natural agencies? Certainly most of the insects of minor 
economic importance are potentially as destructive as those for the 
control of which great sums of money are spent. Indeed, the con- 
