June io, 1911.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
893 
is well known, but whether they destroy great 
numbers of game birds is not known. The larger 
blacksnakes no doubt eat many birds and birds’ 
eggs, and among them no doubt some of the 
eggs of quail. They are less likely to find those 
of the ruffed grouse, because as a rule black- 
snakes frequent open country where the under¬ 
brush is low. On the prairies of the West, blue 
racers and bullsnakes no doubt kill many birds 
and eggs, but in the case of these snakes as in 
the case of the. fox, the chief diet is probably 
mice and insects. 
Of the birds destroyed by snakes, the vast 
majority beyond question are those species which 
nest upon the ground, yet the blacksnake is per¬ 
fectly capable of ascending a tree to almost any 
height and of reaching almost any nest. Any¬ 
one who has seen a blacksnake cornered where 
he thought he could escape by climbing a tree 
has probably noted the ease and speed with 
which it ascends, and the readiness with which 
it moves about among the branches, often span¬ 
ning wide intervals to pass from one branch to 
another. 
Wilbur F. Smith, already quoted, recently told 
in Forest and Stream an exceedingly interest¬ 
ing story of an old farm in Redding, Conn., the 
buildings of which were once frequented by 
swallows in such numbers that their nests were 
everywhere. The farm was abandoned for a 
number of years, its owner going to a city to 
live. When he visited the place in summer he 
noticed that year by year the swallows seemed 
to be growing fewer, and finally last summer 
only a single nest was seen in the very peak of 
the roof of the main barn, a situation which 
seemed accessible only tO' a being with wings 
or a ladder. As the observers looked at the 
nest, a blacksnake was seen crawling up a roof 
rafter in the angle between that and the roof 
boards. The next day the owner looking again 
Kt the swallow’s nest saw close to it the snake, 
and protruding from its mouth the wing of a 
swallow. It had destroyed the last of these 
many nests. 
On one occasion Mr. Smith after having photo¬ 
graphed a chestnut-sided warbler on her nest, 
which contained four eggs, went back the next 
day to repeat the operation and found the nest 
empty, but no egg shells about. As he moved 
about the nest in making his examination, he 
disturbed a little snake, a copperhead eighteen 
or twenty inches long, and suspecting it of the 
robbery, killed it and found within it the four 
eggs of the warbler as yet unbroken. 
There are a number of bird enemies, not included 
in the above categories, such as crows, bluejays, 
blackbirds and others whose habits are well 
known. Crows have been seen to fly into trees 
and systematically search for a nest which the 
actions of the frightened mother told them was 
near. Bluejays are notorious egg thieves and 
blackbird sometimes destroy eggs and devour 
young birds. 
Red squirrels make a business of robbing 
birds’ nests, eating eggs and young alike. We 
have seen a squirrel descend an oak tree carry¬ 
ing in his mouth a young robin that he had just 
taken from the nest, and in a locality where 
there are many red squirrels they should be de¬ 
stroyed without mercy, although they are attrac¬ 
tive little beasts. It is hard to have both squir¬ 
rels and birds. In many parts of the Central 
West where ground squirrels abound, it is alto¬ 
gether probable that they destroy the nests and 
young of many ground-nesting birds, but we do 
not know that there is any evidence of this. 
By far the most dangerous enemies of our 
game birds in thickly settled countries are the 
domestic dog and cat. The house cat, as a rule, 
hunts chiefly about the house—within a few 
hundred yards at least—but occasionally cats 
leave the house entirely, become wild and live 
and rear their young in the woods. When this 
takes place, they cover a great deal of ground 
and are most destructive. It is the practice of 
many gunners to kill cats at sight when found 
in the woods. 
Far more injurious than the cat is the domestic 
dog, the faithful guardian of the farmhouse, 
man s best friend. Often the farmer’s house 
dog, either alone or with a companion picked up 
at some neighbor s, may go off and spend a 
whole day hunting through fields, along hedge¬ 
rows and in woods and swamps, partly no doubt 
for the pleasure of hunting, partly also for the 
food that it can kill. A dog that has once 
formed this habit can hardly be broken of it, and 
if there are two of the animals, they can readily 
deplete a neighborhood of its ground-nesting 
birds and the smaller rodents which are not tree 
climbers. Such dogs, with much practice, learn 
to hunt in the most systematic way, following 
up the hedgerows, searching out each corner, 
each bramble patch and looking into the low- 
growing branches of the evergreen trees, liter¬ 
ally making a business of finding whatever flesh 
or fowl or eggs there may be about. While per¬ 
haps they seldom kill the old birds, they destroy 
uncounted numbers of nests, and the quail, wood¬ 
cock or ruffed grouse that attempt to breed with¬ 
in the range of one of these dogs is not likely 
to rear a brood. On the Western prairies the 
same thing happens. Quail and prairie chickens 
suffer, and if there is some pond or low spot 
where two or three pairs of wild ducks try to 
rear their young, the dogs are likely to find and 
destroy them. 
In recent years one or two States have passed 
laws obliging people to keep their dogs tied up, 
but such laws if enacted are enormously un¬ 
popular, and in fact are never obeyed. Yet, if 
the farmer did but know it, it would show good 
business sense for him to keep his dogs con¬ 
fined at least during the breeding season of all 
birds, or from the beginning of May until mid 
July. The value to the farmer of insectivorous 
and song birds has been so thoroughly demon¬ 
strated and the increase of insect pests which 
prey upon agriculture has at different times been 
so great owing to the destruction of small birds 
that by this time we should all have learned to 
do everything in our power to preserve these 
benefactors of the country. In these insectivo¬ 
rous birds we have millions of police officers 
working without pay in our behalf from one 
year’s end to the other. It is true that the same 
officers do not always work in the same place 
the year round. The beautiful insect-eating 
birds that come to us in spring pass along to 
more northern climes and do their summer’s 
work there, but they are followed by another 
migratory wave of residents who stay with us 
all the summer, doing yeoman’s work to protect 
gardens, corn and hay fields. When autumn 
comes a horde of helpers descends on us from 
the North, gleaning insects, insects’ eggs and 
above all the seeds of noxious weeds, and when 
at length these pass on and the hard frost comes, 
then appear the winter birds which stay with us 
all through the season of cold. All through 
those bitter months these little fellows are at 
work, going up and down the trunks and 
branches of the trees, investigating every cranny 
and crevice in the bark, pulling out from their 
hiding places the eggs of insects, or the pupae 
that have gone to sleep there preparatory to their 
attack on the vegetation next spring. Meantime 
the winter woodpeckers are at work, drilling 
holes in the trees, knocking off pieces of bark 
and wood and bringing to light unlucky grubs 
which, if they had been left to mature undis¬ 
turbed, would have cost the land owner dear. 
Few people think much about this. A fly, a 
grasshopper or a bug is merely a single insect— 
small, feeble and incapable of doing much harm, 
but if we multiply this single insect by the mil¬ 
lions that would be found on a few acres, we 
can see that the injury caused by the ceaseless 
work of these millions may very well amount 
to much. 
It has been said that the grasshopper eats his 
own weight each day in vegetation, and while 
the weight of a single grasshopper is not much, 
the weight of a million or of ten million would 
be a great deal, and anyone who has ever seen 
the Western country while it was being visited 
by a flight of what used to be called the Rocky 
Mountain locusts knows that but a very short 
time is required for a horde of those individually 
small things to sweep every vestige of green 
from a great field of growing corn. 
The cat is commonly spoken of as one of the 
great enemies of our birds, and it is an enemy 
and must be reckoned with. But it may be 
doubted if the cats of the country kill one-hun¬ 
dredth part as many useful birds as do the dogs. 
Because the cat frequently brings into the house 
a bird, a rabbit, or a field mouse that it has 
caught, we imagine it to be very destructive, but 
we never see anything of the much greater kill¬ 
ing wrought by the dog. 
Civilization and the improvement which goes 
with it has been the worst enemy of natural life 
on this continent. The draining of the swamps 
reduces the area which moisture-loving birds 
may occupy; the cultivation of the fields takes 
away so much area where birds might breed; 
the cutting down of the forests contracts the 
range of the woods-loving species. On the other 
hand there are many birds that are glad to nest 
about our houses, that accept man as a friend 
and are willing to live with him on terms of 
more or less intimacy. 
It is surely worth the while of all of us who 
love the birds and who appreciate the enormous 
work that they are doing to try to make life easy 
for them and association with man safe for them. 
It is astonishing how readily these naturally wild 
creatures will respond to any advances which we 
make to them and how soon they learn that man 
is not necessarily an enemy. The example of 
the blackhead ducks at Palm Beach, the actions 
of the migrating wild ducks which in New York 
city constantly come into the ponds in parks, 
paying not the slightest attention to men or 
horses or automobiles, or many other things that 
might be expected to terrify them, show very 
clearly that the wild creatures do not fear man, 
except where bitter experience has taught them 
that he must be feared. 
