7S 
The jYaturalifit^’ Cotti/jardoii. 
Sparrows vs. Caterpillars. 
The sparrows have conipletelv dis¬ 
appeared from Bethlehem, Pa., as a 
result of the persistent war upon them. 
A paper of that town says the eonse- 
quenee is, thousands upon thousands 
of caterpillars. “One cannot walk 
through a grove or even along’ the street 
without treading upon a dozen or more 
of insects, and having an equal num¬ 
ber fall upon his person. We have 
noticed whole sides of buildings cover¬ 
ed with these little objects, and even 
the interior of our houses are not free 
from their incursions. It is the natur¬ 
al result of the wholesale and barbar¬ 
ous destruction ofour feathered friends, 
the sparrows.’’ Waynesburg is liter¬ 
ally alive with sparrows, and also with 
caterpillars, and it is our opinion that 
the sparrow is doing nothing but mak¬ 
ing war on and driving our native 
birds away. Thev should be extermin¬ 
ated at once. 
The California Road-runner. 
While traveling on liorse-back 
through some of the little valleys 
of the interior of Southern Cali¬ 
fornia I have often, in passing by 
!)ushes near the road, heard a rustle 
and seen an olive-green bird, with white 
breast, come fluttering out and go rush¬ 
ing on ahead as though challenging a 
race. This is the “road-runner,” and 
if the challenge is accepted the biirl 
will win unless the horse is very swift. 
The road-runner will not try to fly 
away, as most birds, but will skim 
along at a rapid rate. The bird be¬ 
longs particularly to California, and is 
not found east of the Sierra Nevada 
mountains. It is about two feet long. 
its tail being about half its length. 
The tail feathers are green, tipped with 
white. The road-runner has one oreat 
enemy—the rattlesnake—and the bird 
has an ingenious way of getting rid of 
it. Its plan is to wait until it sees the 
snake lying asleep curled uxfin the sun. 
Then he softly collects cactus enough 
to make a prickly hedge around the 
snake. After a while the rattlesnake 
wakes up. tries to uncoil itself after its 
naj), but he cannot do so. A shar[» 
spine pricks his head, another runs in¬ 
to his side, another thorn galls him on 
the other side, and whichever way he 
moves he feels some stinging pain. 
This soon makes the rattlesnake very 
angry, and, as he cannot find anything 
else to strike, he raises his head, opens 
his mouth, and strikes at himself,bury- 
ing his poison fangs in his (jwn flesh, 
and so dies in a little while of his own 
poison. In this way the road-runner 
gets rid of his enemy without exposing 
itself to danger, provided the snake 
does not wake u]) before the cactus 
hedge is finished .—Science Series. 
Wood Pewee. 
( Contopus vireus). 
BY “chickadee.” 
A pair of these quaint little birds 
came to a dead cherry tree in my yard 
about the 15th of June, 1886. In a 
short time they built a nest, composed 
of lichens and bark, lined with horse 
hair, fine grass and small bits of wool, 
in an apple tree close iiy. The outside 
diameter was inches, the inside 2^ 
inches, and was ^ inches in depth. 
The bottom wus so thin that the eggs 
could be seen from below as the nest 
