ECONOMIC VALUE OF BIRDS. 7 



Birds digest their food so rapidly, that it is difficult to 

 estimate from the contents of a bird's stomach at a given 

 time how much it eats during the day. The stomach of a 

 Yellow-billed Cuckoo, shot at six o'clock in the morning, 

 contained the partially digested remains of forty-three 

 tent caterpillars, but how many it would have eaten be- 

 fore night no one can say. 



Mr. E. H. Forbush, Ornithologist of the Board of 

 Agriculture of Massachusetts, states that the stomachs 

 of four Chickadees contained one thousand and twenty- 

 eight eggs of the cankerworm. The stomachs of four 

 other birds of the same species contained about six 

 hundred eggs and one hundred and five female moths 

 of the cankerworm. The average number of eggs 

 found in twenty of these moths was one hundred and 

 eighty-five ; and as it is estimated that a Chickadee may 

 eat thirty female cankerworm moths per day during 

 the twenty -five days which these moths crawl up trees, 

 it follows that in this period each Chickadee would de- 

 stroy one hundred and thirty-eight thousand seven hun- 

 dred and fifty eggs of this noxious insect. 



Professor Forbes, Director of the Illinois State Lab- 

 oratory of Il^atural History, found one hundred and 

 seventy-five larvae of JBiiio — a fly which in the larval 

 stage feeds on the roots of grass — in the stomach of a 

 single Robin, and the intestine contained probably as 

 many more. 



Many additional cases could be cited, showing the 

 intimate relation of birds to insect-life, and emphasizing 

 the necessity of protecting and encouraging these little- 

 appreciated allies of the agriculturist. 



The service rendered man by birds in killing the 

 small rodents so destructive to crops is performed by 

 Hawks and Owls — ^birds the uninformed farmer con- 

 siders his enemies. The truth is that, with two excep- 



