CHAPTER LV
THE SMALLER BIRDS
“Almost all the smaller birds are helpful to us in protecting the fruits of the earth from the ravages of insects. Their services deserve to be recorded in a long and detailed history, but time for that is lacking and we must confine ourselves to brief mention of a few of these valiant caterpillar-destroyers.
“The titmouse, or tomtit, is a small bird full of life and showing a petulant humor. Always in action, it flits from tree to tree, examines the branches with minute particularity, perches on the swaying end of the frailest twig, where it clings persistently even though hanging head downward, accommodating itself to the oscillations of its flexible support without once relaxing its clutch or ceasing its scrutiny of the worm-infested buds, which it tears open in order to get at the enclosed vermin and insect-eggs.
Tufted Titmouse
“It is calculated that a tomtit rids us of three [[301]]hundred thousand of these eggs every year. It has to supply the needs of a family seldom equalled in size; but the support of twenty young ones, or even more, is not too heavy a burden for this active bird to bear. With this infant brood on its hands, it must give constant and careful inspection to buds and to fissures in the bark, in order to catch larvæ, spiders, caterpillars, little worms of all kinds, and thus find food for twenty beaks incessantly agape with hunger at the bottom of the nest.
“Let us suppose the mother bird to arrive with a caterpillar. The nest is immediately all in a tumult: twenty beaks are stretched wide open, but only a single one receives the morsel, while nineteen are kept waiting. The indefatigable mother flies off again, and when the twentieth beak has at last been fed, the first has long since begun again its importunate demands. What a multitude of worms such a brood must consume!
“Whole families of birds devote themselves, as does the titmouse, to this patient quest for insect eggs in the crevices of tree-trunks or concealed in rolled-up leaves, for larvæ between the scales of buds and in worm-holes in wood, and for insects hidden in cracks and crannies. In this kind of hunt the bird does not have to chase its game and catch it by superior swiftness of flight; it must simply know how to find it in its lair. To this end it needs a keen eye and a slender beak; wings play but a secondary part.
“But other species spend their energies in the free [[302]]open-air chase: they pursue their game on the wing, hunting for gnats, moths, mosquitoes, and flying beetles. They must have a short beak, but one that opens wide and snaps up unerringly insects on the wing, despite the uncertainties of aërial flight; a beak in which the victim is caught and held without any retardation of the bird’s swift course; in short, a beak with a sticky lining which a tiny butterfly cannot so much as graze with its wing and not become entangled. Above all, an untiring and swift wing is necessary, one that does not flag in the pursuit of game desperately putting forth its utmost efforts to escape, and one that is not baffled by the tortuous course of a moth driven to bay. A beak inordinately cleft and wings of extraordinary power—such, in a word, should be the equipment of the bird whose hunting ground is the vast expanse of the open air.