WHAT BIRDS DO FOR US 11 



and crown-borers wliich destroy annually fields of timo- 

 thy, clover, and herd's-grass; grasshoppers, locusts, chinch 

 bugs, cutworms, and army worms that have ruined crops 

 enough to pay the national debt many times over. 



But what a hungry feathered army rushes to their at- 

 tack! And how much larger would that army have been 

 if, in our blind stupidity or ignorance, we had not killed off 

 billions of members of it! 



Some habitual fruit- or seed-eating birds of the trees 

 descend to the ground at certain seasons, or when an in- 

 sect plague appears, changing their diet to suit nature's 

 special need; others "lay low" the year around, waging a 

 perpetual insect war. First in that war stands the meadow- 

 lark. It is estimated that every meadow-lark is worth 

 more than one dollar a year to the farmers, if only in con- 

 sideration of the grasshoppers it destroys; and as insects 

 constitute seventy-three per cent, of its diet, the remainder 

 being seeds of weeds chiefly, the farmer might as well draw 

 money out of the bank and throw it in the sea as to allow 

 the meadow-lark to be shot; yet it has long been classed 

 among game birds — a target for gunners, 



"The average annual loss which the chinch bug causes to 

 the United States cannot be less than twenty million dol- 

 lars," says Dr. L. O. Howard, of the Department of Agri- 

 cultiu-e. "It feeds on Indian corn and on wheat and other 

 «mall grains and grasses, puncturing the stalks and causing 

 them to wilt." Incalculable numbers of this pest are 

 eaten every season by bob-whites, or quail, which, it will 

 be seen, are perhaps as valuable to the American people 

 when roaming through our grain fields as when served on 

 toast to our epicures. Blackbirds, crows, robins, native 

 dparrows, chewinks, oven-birds, brown thrashers, groimd 



