C . F . HODGE 
7 
in a year—about pounds of insects and 10 pounds of 
weed-seed. The paper, soon to be published in full, will 
constitute the most complete evidence that the bird, until 
the country is well stocked, is worth one hundred-fold more 
alive and at work than dead. Three years ago I was told 
of a farmer who was asked by some hunters to allow them 
to shoot bobwhite on his land. He replied, “I do n’t like 
to be unneighborly, boys, but I had much rather you would 
go into my barnyard and shoot my chickens.” From the 
point of actual money values involved, the farmer may well 
have been right. As a farmer boy I have seen chinch bugs 
two or three inches deep on the platform of the reaper— 
more bugs than wheat. We harvested three or four bushels 
of shriveled grain to the acre—but there were no bobwhites 
on the farm. 
The above is not intended to suggest any objection to 
held sport. The more we have for the boys, and for the 
girls too, the better; but is not the bobwhite worth too 
much, for the work it is able to do, to use for sport, until 
the country is fully stocked with them, up to the natural 
limits of insect and weed-seed food supply? When this 
condition is reached, both farmer and sportsman will reap 
a rich reward. 
A pair of bobwhites has been known to produce one 
hundred eggs in a season. Five hens reared by the writer 
produced an average of sixty-five eggs apiece. The birds do 
not brood well in confinement, but toward the end of the 
season both the cocks and hens have incubated successfully 
and have reared their broods. The method followed has 
been to leave the nests undisturbed until well filled, and 
then, if neither bird is inclined to brood, the eggs are put 
