1 8 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



Other enemies of our race, take the field in various other 

 directions, and keep up what I may call guerilla raids, in- 

 cessantly operative on the part of certain members of the 

 feathered legions against hordes of injurious animals whose 

 damage to the crops is in the aggregate only less than that 

 wrought by insects. Such are the small rodents, which live 

 entirely upon grass and grain, and whose sharp front teeth 

 chisel the farmer out of no inconsiderable part of his cereal 

 crops, besides nipping in the bud or root the vegetables 

 of the gardener, and girdling the young trees of the 

 orchardist. The dashing guerillas who fight against these 

 enemies of ours are the birds of prey, the Hawks and Owls, 

 a large proportion of which subsist mainly on mice and other 

 small mammals, seldom varying this diet except with the 

 insects they eat in common with most other birds. People 

 are peculiarly blind to the good offices of the rapacious birds 

 — a most useful class, whose occasional raids on the poultry- 

 yard, even the habitual killing of small insectivorous birds 

 by some Hawks, is no offset to the good they do us in destroy- 

 ing noxious mammals. Instead of setting a price upon their 

 heads, to promote their extinction, we should hold their lives 

 priceless. This is a particular instance of the general case, 

 that no natural balance of power in the animal world can be 

 by man disturbed with impunity. 



Insect pests and mammal plagues — these are the two great 

 classes of the husbandman's foes which birds are appointed 

 to hold in check. There are still some other ways in which 

 the feathered tribes show themselves the friends of man. 

 Some countries are infested with venomous reptiles, so 

 numerous and so deadly that the mortality resulting from 

 their poisonous bites forms an item in the census, and the 

 best means of destroying them engages the attention of gov- 

 ernmental officials. In all such countries there are rapacious 

 birds which in the aggregate probably devour more noxious 

 reptiles than are destroyed by the best directed efforts of 

 man. 



