BIRDS IN RELATION TO AGRICULTURE AND HORTI- 

 CULTURE* 



BY LA WHENCE BRUNER 



Nebraska is a good home for birds. We know definitely as many as four 

 hundred different kinds that have been found within our borders and 

 thepresenceof 11 moreisquite probable. Of these two hundred are definitely 

 known to nest in the state; many more certainly should be added to the list. 

 During winter months more than one hundred (120) have been recorded, 

 while the others leave in the fall for the warmer south country, only to return 

 to us with the advent of pleasant weather in the following spring. While 

 there is much to be learned concerning the migrations, nesting, moulting, 

 songs and peculiar ways of living among the different birds that we may see 

 in our groves, fields, along the streams, on the prairies, and about the hedge 

 rows and garden patches, the most important feature connected with their 

 lives to us is their food habits. For it is by what they eat that birds can and 

 do make themselves of so much value to us. Of course birds are of different 

 colors, sizes; and forms, and have their beaks, feet, wings, and tails made so as 

 to best conform to the uses for which they are intended. The woodpeckers 

 have hard, chisel-like beaks for cutting holes in the bark and wood, and, at 

 the same time, their tail feathers are stiff and pointed so as to be of use as 

 props for holding the birds in place while busily engaged at nest making or 

 digging for borers. In a like mannertheir long tongues are barbed so as to 

 spear and drag forth the "worms" when reached. The short, strong beaks 

 of the sparrows "and their relatives are likewise suited for cracking the many 

 kinds of weed seeds eaten by these birds in winter, as well as for crushing 

 such insects as are eaten by the parents or fed to their young during the sum- 

 mer time. 



On account of this most important feature in connection with our birds, 

 we will confine our remarks in this paper chiefly to what they eat, and leave 

 the descriptions of the birds themselves, their haunts, migrations, and nest 

 building for some other time. Then too, almost everybody knows a few of 

 these last mentioned things about most of our common birds. 



Birds can be useful to us in many ways. They can carry the seeds of dif- 

 ferent plants from one place to another so as to help start new groves in which 

 we and our domestic animals may find shelter from the cold winds of winter 

 and the oppressive heat in summer. They plant seeds of shrubs by the way- 



*The present chapter is a combination of two former papers by the author, 

 on the same topic, but the subject matter has been somewhat modified and 

 abridged. The first of these papers appeared in the Proceedings of the Ne- 

 braska Ornithologists' Union, II, pp. 18-29, and the second in the New 

 Elementary Agriculture, pp. 103-117. This last work was issued by the 

 University Publishing Company of Lincoln, Nebr. 



