WHAT BIRDS DO FOR US 9 



destroy millions of dollars' worth of farm produce eveiy 

 year. Now, there are more than five hundred species of 

 them in North America, and the oriole, which eats them as 

 a staple and demolishes very many other kinds of beetles, 

 wasps, bugs, plant-lice, craneflies, grasshoppers, locusts, 

 and spiders, should win opinions as golden as his feathers 

 for this benefaction alone, fit has been said that were all 

 the insects to perish, all the flowers would perish, too, which 

 is not half so true as that were all the birds to perish men 

 would speedily follow them. At the end of ten years the 

 insects, unchecked, would have eaten every green thing 

 off the earth! 



The Birds That Have Charge of the Bark 



For obvious reasons, then, many crawling insects hide 

 themselves under the scaly ]3ark of trees or in holes 

 laboriously txmneled in decaying wood; others deposit 

 their eggs in such secret places. When they die a natural 

 death at the close of summer it is with the happy delusion 

 that the next generation of their species, sleeping in 

 embryo, is perfectly safe. But see how long it takes a 

 woodpecker to eat a hundred insect eggs and empty a 

 burrow of every grub in it ! Inspecting each crevice where 

 moth or beetle might lay her eggs, he works his way around 

 a tree from bottom to top, now stopping to listen for the 

 stirring of a borer under the smooth, innocent-looking bark, 

 now tapping at a suspicious point and quickly drilling a 

 hole where there is a prospect of heading off his victim. 

 Using his bill as a chisel and mallet and his long tongue as a 

 barbed spear to draw the grub from its nethermost hiding 

 place, he lets nothing escape him. Boring beetles, tree- 

 boring caterpillars, timber ants, and other insects which 



