10 BIRDS 



are inaccessible to other birds, must yield their reluctant 

 bodies to that merciless barbed tongue. Our little friend 

 downy and the hairy woodpecker, the most beneficial 

 meinbers of the family, the flicker that descends to the 

 ground to eat ants, the red-headed woodpecker that inter- 

 sperses his diet with grasshoppers, even the much- 

 maligned sapsucker that pays for his intejnperate drinks 

 of freshly drawn sap by eating ants, grasshoppers, flies, 

 wasps, bugs, and beetles — to these common woodpeckers 

 and to their less neighborly kin, more than to any other 

 agency, we owe the preservation of our timber from hordes 

 of destructive insects. 



But acknowledgment of this deep obligation must not 

 cause us to overlook the nuthatches, brown creepers, 

 chickadees, kinglets, and such other helpers that keep up 

 quite as tireless a search for insects on the tree trunks and 

 larger limbs as the more perfectly equipped woodpeckers. 

 "In a single day a chickadee will sometimes eat more than 

 four himdred eggs of the apple plant-louse," says Prof. 

 Clarence Moores Weed, "while throughout the winter one 

 will destroy an immense number of the eggs of the canker- 

 worm." 



Caretakers of the Ground Floor 



Hidden in the grasses at the foot of the trees, among the 

 undergrowth of woodland borders, under the carpet of last 

 year's leaves, and buried in the ground itself, are insect 

 enemies whose name is legion. Among the worst of them 

 are the white grubs — ^the larvae of May beetles or June 

 bugs — and the wireworms which attack the roots of grasses 

 and the farmers' grain; the maggots of crane-flies which do 

 their fatal work under cover of darkness in the soil; root- 



