£. H. CRANE. q1 
food, yet are fond of berries and fruit. From lack of mature 
judgment, based upon knowledge of the habits of the vari- 
ous kinds of birds and their food, man failed to realize 
that by injudicious use of the gun he was fast reducing his 
friends, by killing birds which were the most formidable 
enemies of the very types of insects now known to be most 
injurious to flowers, fruit, and grain. There are few birds 
which do not consume insects enough each day to pay for 
all the fruit or grain they eat. A pair of Turkeys and their 
brood, wild or tame, devour grasshoppers and larve enough 
in a single season to pay for five times the corn or wheat 
necessary to fatten the whole flock in the fall. The tiny 
Hummingbird not only visits flowers for honey and sugar; 
its little stomach is often filled with almost microscopic 
insects and their larve, which are injurious to flowers. 
House-wrens subsist largely at certain seasons upon 
curculios and other larve injurious to fruits. The 
same may be said of the Warblers, Creepers, and other 
species. The Meadow Lark, which is a song-bird, often 
killed by hunters as game, is known to devour hundreds of 
cut-worms, and I believe these worms to be its favorite 
food. Even the granivorous and pugnacious English Spar- 
rows eat a few worms and spiders, just for butter on their 
bread. A farmer’s son in Berrien County, Mich., took the 
craze for getting rid of these little pests, and accordingly 
killed something over 100 birds; ambitious to obtain the 
bounty for his deadly work, he brought the heads to the 
proper official, who, being an ornithologist, readily discov- 
ered that go per cent. of the heads were those of Bluebirds, 
Chipping Sparrows, and Song Sparrows. The boy was glad 
to get off without being heavily fined, and without bounty 
for the ro per cent. of English Sparrows. Almost every boy 
and many adults in the country, village, or city, with the 
English Sparrow craze for an excuse, kill more or fewer 
song-birds each day. In fact, no estimate can exaggerate 
the damage done by this wholesale slaughter of the song- 
