123 
rather led to conclude that American agriculture must look to 
its own resources for a remedy. If, however, we take into account 
the fact that our common white grubs are native insects, most 
of them living originally in the prairie sod, which formed a 
denser, more uniform, and more continuous covering to the sur¬ 
face of the country than the crops now raised by the farmer, 
and further recall the fact that under these primitive conditions 
these insects rarely produced any conspicuous effect upon our 
native vegetation, we may infer with some confidence that they 
are not likely to increase indefinitely and inordinately, but that 
the natural checks which held them primitively within a certain 
well-defined limit will reassert themselves under the not very 
different conditions of a developed agriculture. Such data as 
we have concerning the enemies of these insects, animal and 
vegetable, are presented here more as an indication of the in¬ 
completeness of our knowledge, than because of their present 
practical value. 
Birds .—White grubs and June beetles are eaten to some ex¬ 
tent by a considerable variety of birds, doubtless by many 
more than my cullings of the scanty literature of this subject 
have brought to light. 
In my own studies* * * § , I have found June beetles eaten by the 
robin, catbird, brown thrush, wood thrush, hermit thrush, blue¬ 
bird, and meadow lark; Mr. E. V. Wilcoxf has found both June 
beetles and white grubs in the stomachs of robinst; and Glover 
long ago recorded the occurrence of June beetles in the stomach 
of a woodpecker (Rep. U. S. Comm. Agr. 1865, p. 38.). I)r. A. K. 
Fisher§ reports the occurrence of these beetles in the food of the 
red-tailed hawk, the red-shouldered hawk, the broad-wiuged 
hawk, the sparrow hawk, the screech owl, and the great horned 
owl; and white grubs in that of the red-shouldered hawk, the 
sparrow hawk, and the barred owl. Dr. C. V. Riley’s assistantsl! 
recognized fragments of the beetles in the stomachs of six English 
sparrows, and four large white grubs in one of this species, out 
of five hundred and twenty-two specimens examined. 
To this list I can add only the crowfl and the blue jay, on the 
authority of Dr. B. H. Warren, author of the “Birds of Penn¬ 
sylvania,” the chuck-will’s widow (“Insect Life,” Vol. II., p. 189), 
the king bird (Lintner) and the crow blackbird, whose habit of 
picking up white grubs after the plow is a matter of common 
observation. 
Of these twenty species, taking into account their numbers and 
their feeding habits, I judge that the robin, the catbird, the 
* Bull. Ill. State Lab. Nat. Hist., Vol. I, No. 3. pp. 93, 94. 101, 105, 109,120; Trans. Ill. Hort. 
Soc., 1880, p. 236. 
+ Bull. Ohio Agr. Exper. Station, No. 43 (1892), p. 127. 
t See also Lintner’s 9th Rep. St. Ent. N. Y. (1893), p. 356, 
§ Bull. 3, Div. Economic Ornith. and Mammalogy, U. S. Dept. Agr. 
II Bull. 1, Div. Economic Ornith. and Mammalogy, U. S. Dep. Apr., p. 111. 
U Townend Glover also records the destruction, by crows, of great numbers of both 
grubs and beetles. 
