STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
543 
•WIREWORMS. FED TO YOUNG CROWS. 
11 The rooks convey the first tidings of the presence of this formid¬ 
able enemy by hovering over a field in flocks, and actually pulling 
up the turnips by the roots to search for them, and I cannot but 
believe that their sagacity directs them to the infested plants, 
which are distinguished by their drooping leaves and dark un¬ 
healthy aspect.” An equally observant friend in Surrey, says: 
“ The rooks are accused of doing injury by pulling up the wheat, 
but I, as well as others here, believe that they pull up the attack¬ 
ed plants to get the wireworms, and do not touch the healthy 
plants.” Another informant states that during a period when the 
wireworms were abundant the rooks were busily occupied amongst 
the barley, and where it looked sickly they had drawn the earth 
away from the roots to find the wireworms, and where they had 
been “ working the earth ” none of these worms could afterwards 
be found. But a still stronger and incontrovertible evidence in 
their favor is the fact, that in the rooks which have been shot, a 
few grains of corn only were found in their stomachs but abundance 
of wireworms and other insects. 
But for an occasional word in tho statements above quoted, it 
would be thought it was the crow of this country to which refer¬ 
ence was being made. That it is the worms that they are in 
pursuit of and not tho corn, in the plants they scratch and pull 
up, has been conclusively ascertained. These wireworms and 
their parents, the snapping-beetles, appear to constitute the piin- 
cipal nourishment of the crow. He is educated into a relish for 
them from his infancy. His taste for them is acquired in the nest. 
I am informed by E. B. Ashton, ot White Creek, N. Y., that in 
breaking up a crow's nest in "which the birds weie unfledged 
squads with only pin-feathers started out upon their skin, he found 
their stomachs literally stuffed and distended with Elaters, each 
bird having between seventy or eighty of these beetles in its crop, 
mixed up with a few plant bugs. This fact shows tho valuable 
service which tho crow does us in destroying these pests. Each 
of the young before leaving tho nest, has, fed to it by the old 
birds, some thousands, probably, of these snapping-beetles. 
We close this subject for the present, expecting to again resume 
it when we shall be able to present an account ot the particular 
beetles from which some ot the other kinds of our American 
wireworms are produced, in addition to the two which we have 
herewith described. 
