BOB-WHITE THE FARMER'S FRIEND 101 



ment of the bag limit law" as a means of bringing back this 

 almost vanished species! 



It is fairly beyond question that of all birds that influence 

 the fortunes of the farmers and fruit-growers of North America, 

 the Bob-White is one of the most valuable. It stays on the 

 farm all the year round. When insects are most numerous 

 and busy, Bob-White devotes to them his entire time. He 

 cheerfully fights them, from sixteen to eighteen hours per 

 day. When the insects are gone, he turns his attention to 

 the weeds that are striving to seed down the fields for another 

 year. Occasionally he gets a few grains of wheat that have 

 been left on the ground by the reapers; but he does no damage. . 

 In California, where the valley quail once were very numer- 

 ous, they sometimes consumed altogether too much wheat for 

 the good of the farmers; but outside of California I believe 

 such occurrences are unknown. 



Let us glance over the Quail's food habits: 



One hundred and twenty-nine different weeds have been 

 found to contribute to the Quail's bill of fare. Crops and 

 stomachs have been found crowded with rag-weed seeds, to 

 the number of one thousand, while others had eaten as many 

 seeds of crab-grass. A bird shot at Pine Brook, New Jersey, 

 in October, 1902, had eaten five thousand seeds of green fox- 

 tail grass, and one killed on Christmas Day at Kinsale, Vir- 

 ginia, had taken about ten thousand seeds of the pig-weed. 

 (Elizabeth A. Reed.) In Bulletin No. 21, Biological Survey, it 

 is calculated that if in Virginia and North Carolina there are 

 four Quail to every square mile, and each bird consumes one 

 ounce of seed per day, the total destruction of weed-seeds 



