On no account should children be encouraged to make collections of birds or of eggs. The only objection the author has felt to the very fine bird manuals before the public is that they contain minute directions for the preparation of dead birds for purposes of mounting and preservation, and also for the collection and preservation of birds' eggs. If this were to cause the school children of the country to set out to make collections of birds and of eggs in order to study them, the study would better be omitted. Nothing more deadly than an opera glass should be aimed at a bird for a generation. The utility of a collection is not so great; a dead bird's plumage is not as beautiful as in life, and he loses every attitude and movement which makes him an individual. A corpse is not a bird. Persons who can identify birds by one glimpse of them through the trees, or by a few notes of their song, or by their flight are frequently at a loss to identify the same birds when they are dead, unless they are familiar with the dead birds.
The only collection the children should be encouraged to make is that of nests after the birds are through with them; and especially of nests with whose family history they are acquainted. These may be brought into the schoolroom. In one of our school yards the children discovered a pair of red-eyed vireos building. The nest was so situated that it could be seen from one of the upper schoolroom windows. After the young had left, the nest was taken down, and to the pleasure which the children had enjoyed in watching its builders and their family was added another. They found in the bottom of the nest little bits of the papers they had used in school with their letters and figures upon them.
VI
DIRECTIONS FOR WRITTEN WORK
Have the children give anecdotes about birds that they have observed. Let them describe actions which they saw them perform, paying particular attention to the ways of birds in eating. For example, sparrows were observed carrying hard crusts of bread to a little pool of water, formed in a dent in a tin roof, to soften before attempting to eat them. Day after day crusts were put out, and the water was renewed.
Written descriptions of birds feeding their young.—Young birds live entirely upon insect life. It has been computed that a bird during the first few weeks of its life consumes nearly one and one half times its weight of insects daily. Note the amazing amount of insect life that will be destroyed by the birds of a neighborhood in a single season. Give, if possible, illustrations from your own observation. A robin was noticed feeding one of its young, which sat on a limb with its mouth open, crying for more, except when it was stopped with food. The parent came with her beak filled with worms twenty-seven times in less than as many minutes, and then left her child seemingly as hungry as ever, for he complained and hopped along the limb, keeping a sharp lookout for several minutes. That chick must have been as full of worms as a fisherman's bait-box. Picture the condition of our lawns, gardens, and groves if all the birds were suddenly banished and the insects held full sway. In this connection, the writer should study and make quotations or abstracts from "The Birds of Killingworth," by Longfellow.
In a recent lecture, Prof. Witmer Stone, of Philadelphia, cited many facts to show that birds are nature's great check on the excess of insects, and that they keep the balance between plants and insect life. Ten thousand caterpillars, it has been estimated, could destroy every blade of grass on an acre of cultivated ground. In thirty days from the time it is hatched an ordinary caterpillar increases 10,000 times in bulk, and the food it lives and grows on is vegetable. The insect population of a single cherry tree infested with aphides was calculated by a prominent entomologist at no less than twelve million. The bird population of cultivated country districts has been estimated at from seven hundred to one thousand per square mile. This is small compared with the number of insects, yet as each bird consumes hundreds of insects every day, the latter are prevented from becoming the scourge they would be but for their feathered enemies.
Mr. E. H. Forbush, Ornithologist of the Board of Agriculture of Massachusetts, states that the stomachs of four chickadees contained 1,028 eggs of the cankerworm. The stomachs of four other birds of the same species contained about 600 eggs and 105 female moths of the cankerworm. The average number of eggs found in twenty of these moths was 185; and as it is estimated that a chickadee may eat thirty female cankerworm moths per day during the twenty-five days which these moths crawl up trees, it follows that in this period each chickadee would destroy 138,750 eggs of this noxious insect.