72 BIRDS OF A MARYLAND FARM. 



WEED DESTBUCTION BY NATIVE SPARROWS. 



Spring. — The farmer's strongest allies in his campaign against weeds 

 are the various species of native sparrows (PI. XIII), which are a 

 potent aid every month in the year, though chiefly in the colder 

 months. The value of their work, obvious in fall and winter, is less 

 easily appraised in spring and early summer, but may be suggested 

 by a few notes. 



The sparrows that breed on the farm have to content themselves 

 early in the spring with seeds left from the preceding year, but by 

 the middle of May they find in fields that have lain fallow all winter, 

 or that were in corn the previous season, a plentiful supply of the 

 ripening seeds of chickweed and, a little later, of yellow sorrel. Song 

 sparrows were seen (May 18, 1899) on the edges of such fields helping 

 themselves liberally from opening chickweed pods. Chipping spar- 

 rows were noted (May 30, 1896) far out in a patch of corn stubble 

 feeding on yellow sorrel that was going to seed, and a chipping spar- 

 row and a field sparrow collected June 16 and 17, 1898, had eaten seeds 

 of the same weed. 



Summer. — During the second week in July, 1898, a song sparrow 

 was often seen following lines of knotweed in the road along the bluff, 

 and a telescope showed that it was plucking off the newly ripened seeds. 

 At the same time another song sparrow, killed on the edge of a timothy 

 field, and two grasshopper sparrows from the center of the same field, 

 had eaten seeds of rib-grass, which at the time was a bad weed in the 

 timothy. During August the seed-eating of sparrows is sufficiently 

 noticeable to attract the attention of even a casual observer, for 

 by this time great stores of weed seed have ripened and the young 

 sparrows, which have been exclusively insectivorous, are ready to 

 take vegetable food. The following notes merely give a few specific 

 cases that might have been multiplied many times every day. A song 

 sparrow was observed (August 28, 1898) picking out soft imooaature 

 seeds from a spike of green fox-tail grass, a plant that, with its con- 

 gener pigeon-grass, furnishes seed-eating birds with favorite food. 

 On the same date a score of chipping sparrows were noted amid crab- 

 grass, which was spreading so rapidly through a market garden in 

 a pear orchard on the Bryan place that it was likely to impair the 

 product. They hopped up to the fruiting stalks, which were then in 

 the milk, and beginning at the tip of one of the several spikes that 

 radiated from a commpn center like the spokes of a wheel and, grad- 

 ually moving their beaks along to the base, they chewed off the seeds 

 of spike after spike in regular succession. Usually the3'^ did not 

 remove their beaks until they reached the base, though some individ- 

 uals, especially birds of the year, would m^unch a few seeds in the 

 middle of a spike and then take a fresh one. Fourteen birds were col- 



