34 BULLETIN 868, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
reported that starlings had pulled nearly an acre of corn in one field, 
and at Spring House, Pa., it was asserted that starlings had pulled 
corn so badly on a 10-acre field that it had to be replanted. 
While laboratory examination shows that the starling is not an ex- 
tensive feeder on ripening corn, field observation indicated that where 
jocal conditions are favorable, as in the vicinity of roosts, the birds may 
do damage. The aggregate loss to the corn crop which can be defi- 
nitely attributed to the starling is not great. Many of the com- — 
plaints against the starling have been based on a misidentification of 
the species—red-winged blackbirds and grackles being more frequently 
responsible. The aggregate loss to sprouting corn is trivial. The 
fact that starlings are easily frightened by gunfire and will shun an 
area after a day or two of shooting suggests effective preventive 
measures, which have not proved successful in the case of the other 
two species mentioned. 
SMALL GRAIN. 
The farmer has little need to fear the starling as a menace to small 
grains. Twenty of the 2,301 adult birds examined had fed on small 
erain, and of these 13 had eaten wheat, 6 oats, and 1 millet. In 
bulk this formed 0.39 per cent of the food, and fully half of this was" 
eaten at a time of year when it manifestly must have been waste. 
The few complaints on this score were either so trivial in nature or so 
widely separated that the aggregate injury is not important. The 
complaints involved the picking up of newly sown oats, the “‘pull- 
ing’’ of sprouting oats, and feeding on ripened wheat and millet. 
At Sound Beach, Long Island, a flock of about 500 starlings was 
noted feeding in a millet patch, the owner of which claimed that 
the birds had eaten all the seed from a similar patch in the previous 
year and that it appeared as if they would repeat the performance. 
GARDEN TRUCK. 
From the impossibility of satisfactorily identifying such food items 
as chewed-up bits of lettuce and spinach leaves, tender pods of peas, 
pulp of tomatoes, etc., it is apparent that stomach examination does 
not satisfactorily determine the relation of the starling to garden 
truck. In no case were such items positively identified in stomachs, 
though reliable field observers have witnessed attacks on these and 
other products of the garden at odd times. The depredations are 
confined mainly to small city gardens, where the succulent green 
foods are readily accessible to an unusually large number of star- 
lings. In intensively cultivated truck-crop areas, as in the Brook- 
dale section, north of Bloomfield, N. J., similar conditions sometimes 
prevail. | 
