90 Wild Bird Guests 



infinitely more valuable alive than dead. It 

 lives very largely on locusts, and when these are 

 numerous they are eaten almost exclusively. 



Quail and grouse are valuable both as food and 

 as destroyers of insects and weed seeds. The 

 former, at least, are more valuable alive than 

 dead. They are wonderful destroyers of potato 

 bugs, and if encouraged to nest in the fields and 

 fence corners, no Paris green need be used on the 

 potato crops. On locusts they work just as well. 

 Professor Aughey found in the stomachs of 

 twenty-one quail, 539 of these insects, an average 

 of twenty-five apiece, and that only a part of 

 one day's work. These birds also eat large 

 numbers of chinch bugs, cotton worms, cotton- 

 boll weevils, cucumber beetles. May beetles, 

 leaf beetles, clover-leaf beetles, corn-hill bugs, 

 wire worms, cutworms, ants, flies, and many 

 other insect pests. And being birds of good size 

 they require large quantities of such food. As 

 destroyers of weed seed they stand as high if not 

 higher. Forbush states that they eat the seeds 

 of over sixty different kinds of weeds, those of 

 ragweed seeming to be the favorite. The same 

 authority tells us that "as many as two to three 

 hundred seeds of smartweed, five hundred of the 

 red sorrel, seven hundred of the three-seeded 

 mercury, and one thousand of the ragweed have 



