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68 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HINGHAM 
Let us admire the wisdom and goodness of Providence so clearly 
shown in this universal law of nature, that, in the season when insects 
most abound and increase, the whole feathered tribe, without any known 
exceptions of those who inhabit the land, become insect eaters by prefer- 
ence. And those insects which are most abundant, and which do our 
crops the most harm and which man is so powerless to check when they 
have once got the upper hand, all have their enemies among the resi- 
dent birds who would be able to keep them in complete subjection if 
man did not interfere. No insect has so mahy enemies as our worst 
pest, the canker-worm. But none of these are permitted by man to 
have any chance. The purple grakle eats our corn and we have nearly 
extirpated them. The cherry bird is an outlaw, and hunted with- 
out mercy. Our wild pigeons are too tempting to the epicure to be 
spared, and our tame doves, who might be made a better substitute, are 
not sufficiently abundant. Prowling cats destroy a very large propor- 
tion of the chipping sparrows and vireos, and so on, until the canker- 
worm, between our destruction of its natural enemies and our half- 
attempts to keep it down, riots in unchecked and ever increasing 
destructiveness. 
It has been fully demonstrated in Europe that even the most de- 
structive of all their terrible pests, the cockchafer, can be very nearly 
or quite exterminated by taking pains to encourage and favor the in- 
crease of the starling, a bird about the size, and in character allied with 
our meadow lark. A well-known Hamburg horticulturist, John Boot, 
tried the experiment of cultivating the starling, and with complete suc- 
cess. I give his statement in nearly his own words: ten years since 
the canker-worm, (one of the Huropean names of this insect), visited 
his grounds, destroyed whole enclosures of rhododendrons and coniferx, 
His own field suffered also. All artificial means to destroy them failed. 
He bethought him of the starlings, caused a hundred nest boxes to be 
constructed, all of which were occupied by these birds, and in the 
course of one season the nuisance was abated. Their modus operandi 
is to search for these vermin just as they near the surface of the earth 
to emerge as beetles. The starling summarily hauls him out, and 
thatis his last of earth. Mr. Boot encouraged the starling to increase, 
until he had two hundred pairs on his place,.and it is now very rarely 
that he finds one of the worms inhis grounds. His observations of ten 
years, and his very careful generalization of these repeated notes lead 
