3 



Another 'early bird, though not so abundant as the robin, is the 

 blue-bird. The blue-bird has the good qualities of the robin without 

 any of his questionable ones. You may find him eating some vegeta- 

 ble food in the fall, but for the most part he eats insects. The insects 

 chosen by the blue-bird are chiefly harmful ones, especially those 

 forms that are injiirious to trees. Do you know where to look for 

 blue-birds, in the woods, the open fields or in gardens? 



One of our common birds, which boys are fond of shooting, is the 

 meadow-lark. The meadow-laxk is one of the farmers' most efficient 

 helpers. Its food is chiefly made up of beetles, caterpillars and grass- 

 hoppers, varied by an occasional diet of seeds. At the Department of 

 Agricultiire at Washington, the contents of the stomach of a meadow- 

 lark were examined and 54 grasshoppers were found. See if you can 

 work out the number of grasshoppers destroyed by meadow-larks un- 

 der the following statement. If one meadow-lark eats 50 grasshoppers 

 in a day, and there are 20 meadow-larks to the square mile in your 

 region, how many grasshoppers will these 30 meadow-larks destroy 

 in a month? ISTow, it has been found that a grasshopper weighs about 

 15 grains and that it eats about its own weight of vegetable food 

 each day. If you care to you can work out how much vegetation the 

 grasshoppers would have destroyed in a square mile had they not been 

 destroyed by the meadow-larks. 



All of you have seen the red-headed wood-pecker, hammering away 

 at the tree trunks with his chisel-like bill. The red-head has a num- 

 ber of near relatives in the State. Indeed there are seven kinds of 

 birds in Indiana belonging to the wood-pecker family. We have the 

 downy wood-pecker and the hairy wood-pecker, which are com- 

 monly known as the sap-suckers, and the yellow-bellied wood-pecker, 

 which is the true sap-sucker, and the yellow-hammer, and other forms 

 not so common. Now all of these birds, with perhaps the exception 

 of the yellow-bellied wood-pecker, are of great value to the farmer. 

 Their food is very largely made up of insects of various kinds, but es- 

 pecially of those which are injurious to trees. You can see that "this 

 must be true, because of the habits of the bird. Indeed the health of 

 forest trees depends very largely upon the work of the wood-peckers 

 in destrojang the insect enemies of the trees. Do you know that the 

 oak tree is the home of 500 different kinds of insects, all of which 

 are more or less injurious to it? The combined work of these insects 

 would in time destroy the trees were the insects not kept in check by 

 the wood-peckers and other birds. Other trees are the homes for large 

 numbers of insect forms, bilt none have quite so many resident ene- 

 mies as the oak. The constant hammering of the red-head and his rel- 



