﻿Common Birds in Relation to Agriciolture. 291 



Some Common Birds in their Kelation to 

 Agriculture.^ 



By F. E. L. Beal, B.S. 



Introduction. 



It has long been known that birds play an important 

 part in relation to agriculture, but there seems to be 

 a tendency to dwell on the harm they do rather than on 

 the good. Whether a bird is injurious or beneficial 

 depends almost entirely upon what it eats, and in the 

 case of species which are unusually abundant or which 

 depend in part upon the farmer's crops for subsistence the 

 character of the food often becomes a very practical 

 question. If crows or blackbirds are seen in numbers 

 about cornfields, or if woodpeckers are noticed at work in 

 an orchard, it is perhaps not surprising that they are* 

 accused of doing harm-. Careful investigation, however, 

 often shows that they are actually destroying noxious 

 insects, and also that even those which do harm at one 

 season may compensate for it by eating noxious species at 

 another. Insects are eaten at all times by the majority 

 of land birds, and during the breeding season most kinds 

 subsist largely and rear their young exclusively on 

 this food. When insects are unusually plentiful, they are 

 eaten by many birds which ordinarily do not touch them. 

 Even birds of prey resort to this diet, and when insects 

 are more easily obtained than other fare, the smaller 

 hawks and owls live on them almost entirely. This was 

 well illustrated during, the recent plague of Kocky 

 Mountain locusts in the Western States, when it was 

 found that locusts were eaten by nearly every bird in the 

 region, and that they formed almost the entire food of a 

 large majority of the species. 



1 Reprinted from Farmers' Bulletin No. 54, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1897. 



