108 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
dred insects, or up to four thousand insect or worm eggs.’’ The 
same author has undertaken a very careful study of bird life in Mas- 
sachusetts and his conclusion is that there are about five insect eat- 
ing birds per acre in that state. The daily consumption of insects 
by these 25,600,000 birds, is 2,560,000,000. To the average reader, 
these figures contain little more than an idea of vastness and for 
that reason Reed has translated them into simpler language. He says, 
‘‘About 120,000 insects fill a bushel measure. This means that the 
daily consumption of chiefly obnoxious insects in Massachusetts is 
21,000 bushels. This estimate is good for about five months in the 
year." 
The common meadow lark (Sturnella magna) has been studied 
with reference to its capacity for destroying injurious insects and 
the result has been surprising. The investigation which furnished 
evidence for the bird’s usefulness consisted of a laboratory examina- 
tion of ‘‘two hundred and thirty-eight stomachs collected in twenty- 
four states, the District of Columbia and Canada.’’ Insect food 
was found to be 71.7 percent as compared with 26.5 per cent of 
vegetable food. In other words, almost three-fourths of this bird’s 
food for the entire year consists of insects. Grasshoppers, locusts and 
crickets appear to be the usual diet of the lark, the average amount 
consumed during the year being about 29 per cent of all food. An 
interesting chapter might be written about the lark as a destroyer 
of injurious grasshoppers. Here is a calculation from Dr. Fisher. 
He states that ‘‘the weight of an average grasshopper is 15.4 grains 
and its daily consumption of food equals it own weight. It is safe 
to assume that fifty grasshoppers are eaten each day. Now if the 
number of birds breeding in one square mile of meadow land is esti- 
mated at five pairs, and the number of young that reach maturity 
at only ten in all, there will be twenty birds on the square mile dur- 
ing the grasshopper season. On this basis the birds would destroy 
. 30,000 grasshoppers in one month. Assuming that each grasshop- 
per if left alone would have lived thirty days, the thousand grass- 
happers eaten by the larks each day, represent a saving of sixty-six 
pounds of forage a month. If the value of this forage is estimated 
at ten dollars per ton the value of the crops saved by meadow larks 
on a township of thirty-six square miles each month during the 
grasshopper season, would be about three hundred and fifty-six 
dollars 
Butgrasshoppers are not the only insects eaten by the lark. 
