E. H. CRANE. 



71 



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 larvee 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 larvae, which are injurious to flowers. 

 House-wrens subsist largely at certain seasons upon 

 curculios and other larvae 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 loo 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 90 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 10 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- 



