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Experimental Zoology Laboratory 
Champaign, Illinois 
Save the Crow 
By JANET NORRIS BANGS 
THE realization that grasshoppers have been invading Illinois through 
counties formerly free from them, strengthens my protest against 
the dynamiting of our great insectivorous bird, the common crow, 
The scientific stomach analysis of crows, carried on over a period of 
years (U. S. Dept. of Agriculture bulletins, 1102 and 621), reveals 
that a crow will eat a hundred grasshoppers to a meal, and several 
meals a day. Mathematicians may figure out the number of grass- 
hoppers that might have been destroyed by those hundreds of 
thousands of crows slaughtered in the Middle West. In 1933 there 
began an active campaign against the crow. In 1936 Illinois lost 
seventeen million dollars due to grasshopper damage. 
Nineteen thirty-eight was the worst grasshopper year ever known 
in the West, despite the fact that the government spread down near 
two hundred thousand tons of poison bran at a cost of more than 
two million dollars (Science News Letter). Roads in states west 
of us were slippery with “hoppers,” and, despite the cold rains which 
delayed hatching here, some Illinois gardens were chewed up. Locusts 
are predicted for next summer, and still they dynamite the crow! 
We may endorse a program to propagate game birds in natural 
numbers, but we must oppose the slaughter of so-called “predators,” 
the crow (and also the fox, the owl and hawk). The propaganda, 
now spreading throughout the nation, would have us believe that the 
crow is the enemy of the farmer, and also the butcher of birds. 
According to the stomach analysis, less than one half of one percent 
of the annual food of the adult crow is made up of wild birds or 
their eggs. It is true that an occasional nest may be robbed in the 
spring for the nestling crow, but even the nestling’s diet contains 
but one and one half per cent of birds and their eggs and is forty- 
eight per cent insectivorous. The young like the soft bodies of cater- 
pillars; and May beetles, grubs, weevils, chinch bugs, wire worms, 
army or cut worms, locusts, snakes and rodents are among the six 
hundred and fifty items found in the diet of the crow. 
Near five hundred small caterpillars were identified in the food 
of one crow. Tussock moths, many other moths, tent caterpillar eggs 
and canker worms, have been found in one form or another in the 
crow gizzard. It seems more than a coincidence that some Illinois 
elms have been troubled with canker worms, and that nut trees in 
Indiana, where hundreds of thousands of crows have been shot, were 
last summer stripped by caterpillars. 
It is true of course that the crow takes some corn—a few farmers 
realize that he has earned it. The pheasant that has been placed on 
