R-USU 



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3/10/33 



But, at timesj none of these methods will work* You may have to shoot, or 

 trap, or poison a few crowS hefore the rest take the hint* 



The crow is an old-timer and many farmers have learned pretty well how to 

 get along with the hird. But, now, along comes a nev; hird prohlem. As the 

 European starling spreads to the South and West, farmers in maiiy sections have to 

 find some kind of working arrangement with the starling, 



I say working arrangement hecause, in spite of its reputation with some 

 folks, the starling is a very industrious and very helpful worker on the farm. In 

 fact, McAtee tells me the starling is much hetter about destroying such pests as 

 the clover-leaf weevil, and May heetles, and cutworms, and grasshoppers than many 

 of our protected native hirds. 



But, of course, in some communities, the starling, like the crow, does quite 

 a hit of damage to crops. 



In iJew York, starlings do considerable damage to cherries. 



The Biological Survey sent one of its men to i\Few York to study the starling 

 prohlem and work out a way to keep the starling in check. 



Starlings don't pay much attention to any ordinary kind of scare-crow. The 

 Biological Survey's representative — Clarence Cottam — soon found that out. To 

 scare the starlings, your scarecrow must have a good bit of noise and action about 

 it. But even the moving, noisy variety of scarecrov/ doesn't seem to v/ork for long. 

 The starlings soon get used to it and go right ahead picking their cherries. 



Cottam then tried shooting. But he wasn't interested in staging any v/hole- 

 sale killing. He merely shot into the flocks to give the starlings a scare. 



Cottam found he could worry the starlings enough to keep them aMay from the 

 cherries by shooting around over the orchard about an ho^^r to an hour and a half 

 each day during the cherry season. 



What works with one kind of bird doesn't always v;ork with another. In 

 California the horned larks scratch, and dust, and feed in bare fields, or in 

 fields with a scattered growth of weeds. From those weed fields, they move over 

 to near-by truck patches for a meal of tender lettuce, or bean, or carrot sprouts. 

 Often, they do a great deal of damage. 



Vegetable growers have tried to control the larks in a number of v/ays. They 

 tried patrolling their fields with guns. But the gun-shooting stunt doesn't work 

 as v/ell on the horned larks in California as it does on starlings in i\Tew York. 

 The vegetable fields in the West ard* often very large, A man may have a field of 

 lettuce covering 80 acres. Fancy trotting over that SO acres trying to keep up 

 with a flock of horned larks. You'd no sooner scare them from one side of the 

 field until they'd settle on the other side. They'd run the legs off of you, and 

 cost you a lot of money, and get a good mess of your lettuce or beans to boot. 



The growers have also tried plowing up the fields adjoining their truck 

 crops and keeping them fallow so as to drive the larks farther from their crops. 

 But that plan isn't always practical. 



