SOME COMMON BIRDS USEFUL TO THE FARMER. 
25 
Nearly a fourth of tlie 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 six species of wood¬ 
peckers are familiarly known 
throughout 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 mi¬ 
gratory. 
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 conspicuous 
mark on a healthy tree, except 
when it is affected by wood-boring 
larvae, which are accurately lo¬ 
cated, dislodged, and devoured by 
the woodpecker. 
Two of the best-known wood¬ 
peckers, the hairy woodpecker 1 (fig. 20) and the downy woodpecker, 2 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 generally, 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 conservators of forests. To them more than 
to any other agency we owe the preservation of timber from hordes of destruc¬ 
tive insects. 
Fig. 20.—Hairy woodpecker. Length, about 9 
inches. 
1 Dryobates villosus. 
2 Dryobates pubescens. 
