VALUE OF BIRDS TO MAN. 75 



increase of the sugar-cane insects, particularly white grubs, 

 which were then so abundant. 1 A similar effect was observed 

 by the early settlers of America to follow the shooting of 

 the birds which attacked their crops. Kalm states, in his 

 Travels in America, that in 1749, after a great destruction 

 among the Crows and Blackbirds for a legal reward of three 

 pence per dozen , the northern States experienced a complete 

 loss of their grass and grain crops. The colonists were 

 obliged to import hay from England to feed their cattle. 

 The greatest losses from the ravages of the Rocky Mountain 

 locust were coincident with, or followed soon after, the de- 

 struction by the people of countless thousands of Blackbirds, 

 Prairie Chickens, Quail, Upland Plover, Curlew, and other 

 birds. This coincidence seems significant, at least. 



Professor Aughey tells how this slaughter was accom- 

 plished. He says that the Blackbirds and many other birds 

 decreased greatly in Nebraska in the twelve years previous 

 to 1877. He first went to the State in 1864. He never saw 

 the Blackbirds so abundant as they were during 186" 5 over 

 eastern Nebraska. Vast numbers of them were poisoned 

 around the corn fields in spring and fall during the twelve 

 years, so that often they were gathered and thrown into 

 piles. This was done in the belief that the Blackbirds were 

 damaging the crops, especially the corn. Great numbers of 

 birds of other species were destroyed at the same time. A 

 single grain of corn soaked with strychnine would suffice to 

 kill a bird. In one autumn, in Dakota County alone, not 

 less than thirty thousand birds must have been destroyed in 

 this way. Regarding this slaughter he wrote : — 



Supposing that each of these birds averaged eating one hundred and 

 fifty insects each day, we then have the enormous number of one hun- 

 dred and thirty-five million insects saved in this one county in one 

 month that ought to have been destroyed through the influence of birds. 

 When we reflect, further, that many of these birds were migratory, and 

 that they helped to keep down the increase of insects in distant regions, 

 the harm that their destruction did is beyond calculation. The killing 

 of such birds is no local loss ; it is a national, a continental loss. 2 



» Insect Life, by Riley and Howard. 1894, Vol. VI, No. 4, p. 333. 

 2 First Report of the United States Entomological Commission. Riley, Pack- 

 ard, and Thomas. 1877, pp. 343, 344. 



