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CONDENSED NOTES ON THE FOOD HABITS OF CERTAIN NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS.

Millions of Americans and near-Americans, both old and young, now need to be shown the actual figures that represent the value of our birds as destroyers of the insects, weeds and the small rodents that are swarming to overrun and devour our fields, orchards and forests.  Will our people never learn that in fighting pests the birds are worth ten times more to men than all the poisons, sprays and traps that ever were invented or used?

We cannot spray our forests; and if the wild birds do not protect, them from insects, nothing will!  If you will watch a warbler collecting the insects out of the top of a seventy-foot forest oak, busy as a bee hour after hour, it will convince you that the birds do for the forests that which man with all his resources cannot accomplish.  You will then realize that to this country every woodpecker, chickadee, titmouse, creeper and warbler is easily worth its weight in gold.  The killing of any member of those groups of birds should be punished by a fine of twenty-five dollars.

[Illustration:  THE PURPLE MARTIN A Representative of the Swallow Family.  A Great Insect-eater; one of the Most Valuable of all Birds to the Southern Cotton planter, and Northern farmer.  Shot for “Food” in the South.  Driven out of the North by the English Sparrow Pest.]

THE BOB-WHITE.—­And take the Bob White Quail, for example, and the weeds of the farm.  To kill weeds costs money—­hard cash that the farmer earns by toil.  Does the farmer put forth strenuous efforts to protect the bird of all birds that does most to help him keep down the weeds?  Far from it!  All that the average farmer thinks about the quail is of killing it, for a few ounces of meat on the table.

It is fairly beyond question that of all birds that influence the fortunes of the farmers and fruit-growers of North America, the common quail, or bob white, is one of the most valuable.  It stays on the farm all the year round.  When insects are most numerous and busy, Bob White devotes to them his entire time.  He cheerfully fights them, from sixteen to eighteen hours per day.  When the insects are gone, he turns his attention to the weeds that are striving to seed down the fields for another year.  Occasionally he gets a few grains of wheat that have been left on the ground by the reapers; but he does no damage.  In California, where the valley quail once were very numerous, they sometimes consumed altogether too much wheat for the good of the farmers; but outside of California I believe such occurrences are unknown.

Let us glance over the bob white’s bill of fare: