1908-1909.) , 63 



2,000 caterpillars in that one day. And a Robin is known to have 

 eaten 14 feet of earthworms in one day. 



Take our 62 million pairs of breeding birds. Say that one- 

 third of them have young at any one time. Let the parents visit 

 the nest with food every five minutes for only ten hours per day ; 

 the basis we take is low enough, yet it means that over 25 hundred 

 million meals are furnished to our infant birds each day during the 

 breeding season ! 



With these awful figures before us, we may reasonably ask 

 how do these birds affect us — do they cost us anything, or save us 

 anything ? Speaking in general terms and of our birds as a whole, 

 the mortifying confession must be made, that we do not know. 

 Take up any of our standard works on British Birds, and with the 

 exception of one family, you will not find any detailed information 

 as to their feeding habits to prove whether they are useful or not. 

 This want of knowledge was clearly admitted by the Third Inter- 

 national Ornithological Congress, which met at Paris in 1900, and 

 which passed a resolution requesting the different nations to insti- 

 tute researches into the question of the feeding of birds. Reports 

 of the results of the researches were to have been brought forward 

 at the Fourth Congress, held in London in 1905 ; bui of all the 

 nations, Hungary was the only country that could produce any 

 results in this field. At the Dublin meeting of the British Associ- 

 ation for the Advancement of Science this autumn, Section D 

 provided an object lesson in this want of proper scientific know- 

 ledge amongst us. Two of our best known bird men took entirely 

 opposite views as to the usefulness or harmfulness of one extremely 

 common bird. The one spoke as a farmer, the other as a bird- 

 lover, and when they had done we were no wiser than before. 

 In a question such as this, we must use neither the rose-tinted 

 glasses of the sentimentalist, nor the smoked glasses of the farmer 

 or gardener ; we must rely upon the glasses of the microscope in 

 the hands of a properly qualified investigator. He must not only 



