Some Common Birds Useful lo the Farmer 
25 
Nearly a fourth of the birds’ total food is composed of ants. These insects 
are generally annoying and often very injurious, especially on account of their 
damage to stored products and because of their habit of fostering destructive 
plant lice. More than a fifth of the nighthawk’s food consists of June bugs, 
dung beetles, and other beetles of the leaf-chafer family. These are the adults 
of white grubs, noted pests, and even as adults many members of the family 
are decidedly harmful. 
Numerous other injurious beetles, as click beetles, wood borers, and weevils, 
are relished. True bugs, moths, flies, grasshoppers, and crickets also are 
important elements of the food. Several species of mosquitoes, including the 
transmitter of malaria, are eaten. Other well-known pests consumed by the 
nighthawk are Colorado potato beetles, cucumber beetles, rice, clover-leaf, and 
cotton-boll weevils, bill bugs, bark beetles, squash bugs, and moths of the cotton 
worm. 
Nighthawks are much less numerous than formerly, chiefly because of 
wanton shooting. They are given full legal protection almost everywhere, and 
citizens should see that the law is 
obeyed. The bird is far too useful 
and attractive to be persecuted. 
THE WOODPECKERS 
Five or sis species of woodpeck¬ 
ers are familiarly known through¬ 
out the eastern United States, and 
in the West are replaced by others 
of similar habits. Several species 
remain in the Northern States 
through the entire year, while 
others are more or less migratory. 
Farmers are prone to look upon 
woodpeckers with suspicion. When 
the birds are seen scrambling over 
fruit trees and pecking holes in 
the bark, it is concluded that they 
must be doing harm. Careful ob¬ 
servers, however, have noticed 
that, excepting a single species, 
these birds rarely leave any con¬ 
spicuous mark on a healthy tree, 
except when it is affected by wood¬ 
boring larvte, which are accurately 
located, dislodged, and devoured 
by the woodpecker. 
Two of the best-known woodpeckers, the hairy woodpecker 58 (fig. 20) and the 
downy woodpecker, 67 including their races, range over the greater part of the 
United States. They differ chiefly in size, their colors being practically the 
same. The males, like those of many other woodpeckers, are distinguished by 
a scarlet patch on the head. An examination of many stomachs of these two 
species shows that from two-thirds to three-fourths of the food consists of 
insects, chiefly noxious kinds. Wood-boring beetles, both adults and larvae, are 
conspicuous, and with them are associated many caterpillars, mostly species 
that burrow into trees. Next in importance are the ants that live in decaying 
wood, all of which are sought by woodpeckers and eaten in great quantities. 
Many ants are particularly harmful to timber, for if they find a small spot of 
decay in the vacant burrow of a wood borer, they enlarge the hole, and, as 
their colony is always on the increase, continue to eat away the wood until the 
whole trunk is honeycombed. Moreover, they are not accessible to birds gen¬ 
erally, and could pursue their career of destruction unmolested were it not 
that the woodpeckers, with beaks and tongues especially fitted for such work, 
dig out and devour them. It is thus evident that woodpeckers are great con¬ 
servators of forests. To them more than to any other agency we owe the preser¬ 
vation of timber from hordes of destructive insects. 
Fig. 20. — Hairy woodpecker. Length, aoout 9 
inches. 
66 Dryobates villosus. 
67 Dryobates pubescent* 
