Little Native American
friend which the noisy sparrows are doing their best to drive away. This is the house-wren: as interesting and busy a little mite as ever protected a garden from noxious insects. If you make your wren-house door the size of a silver quarter of a dollar no robber sparrow can enter to despoil the nest.
Of our seven common species of swallows, four are availing themselves of the opportunity offered by the barns for nesting.
Wild Robin at His Bath. Photographed from life by Samuel Jackson.
Barn-swallows build under roofs; cliff-swallows, under eaves; the white-bellied-swallow and martin, in boxes set up for that purpose, when these shelters are not preëmpted by the English sparrows.
The native swallows destroy an amount of noxious insects beyond calculation, and almost beyond imagination. Without birds this world would, because of insects, be uninhabitable, yet each year two hundred millions of them are sacrificed for women’s hats and bonnets. Aside from the inexcusable barbarity of this practice is its menace to our trees, our crops, and our very existence.