546 
ECONOMIC RELATIONS OF OUR BIRDS. 
Table showing the kinds and number of insects, cray-fish and earth-worms eaten 
by the American Starlings — continued. 
Number and Name of Speci¬ 
mens Examined. 
Classification 
OF Food. 
Ratios Represented by Lines. 
1 
8 
Moths. 
wwmst 
Of five Rusty Grackles 
3 
.9 
7 
Beetles. 
Bn 
examined. 
1 
2 
d 
o 
2 
Snails. 
■ 
3 
U 
17 
Adult forms. 
111. Dolichonyx oryzivorus (Linn.), Sw. BOBOLINK; REED-BIRD; RICE- 
BIRD. Group I. Class b. 
From the first till the middle of May these northward-moving night-travelers 
are spirited into our meadows out of the impending darkness, some to select 
summer homes, but many more to feed and rest and then hurry to the Saskatch¬ 
ewan country, as if anxious to cut short the time when they may return to the 
sunny south; and true to their instincts, early in August they come trooping 
back, and, joined by those who have bred by the way, they are all off by the 
middle of the month. 
These birds confine themselves, until after the breeding season, almost exclu¬ 
sively to meadows, frequenting both the wet and the dry. Such haunts as these 
and their insectivorous habits place them among our most valuable birds. The 
occasional and brief visits which these birds make to grain-fields, in August, 
result in so trifling an injury that it should be entirely overlooked in view of the 
great service they render in the meadows. 
It is greatly to the loss of the Northern States that so many of these birds are 
destroyed in the South, where their destruction to the rice crop is very great. 
But before we can consistently ask our Southern friends to stay this destruction, 
we must know more definitely than we do now what injury and what service 
the Bobolink renders to them, and what its economy is farther south where it 
spends the winter; we must know, too, what proportion of those which are per¬ 
mitted to come back may be induced to breed with us in preference to passing 
on to the north of the United States. 
Dr. Brewer states that more recently it has been ascertained that these birds 
feed greedily upon the larvae of the destructive cotton-worm, and that in so 
doing render an immense service to the cultivators of Sea Island cotton. What 
has been said in the Introduction in regard to the army-worm should be called 
to mind in this connection. 
Food: Of thirteen specimens examined, one had eaten caterpillars; three 
others, larvae, probably caterpillars; three, seven beetles, among them two 
lamellicorns and one elater; three, six dipterous insects, among them four Mu- 
cidae; four, seven grasshoppers; one, a cricket; one, ten grasshoppers’ eggs; one, 
