Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

Flying down on the fields by hundreds of thousands these birds often take almost the entire crop of a district. The yearly loss to rice-growers from bobolinks has been estimated at two million dollars.

If crows or blackbirds are seen in large numbers about fields of grain they are generally accused of robbing the farmer, but more often they are busily engaged in hunting the insects that without their help would soon have destroyed his crop; and even if they do considerable damage at one season they often pay for it many times over.

Whether a bird is helpful or the reverse, in fact, depends entirely on the food it eats and often even farmers who have been familiar with birds all their lives do not know what food a bird really eats. As an example of the misunderstanding that is often found in regard to birds, when hawks are seen searching the fields and meadows, or owls flying about the orchards in the evening, the farmer always supposes that his poultry is in danger, when in reality the birds are quite as likely to be hunting for the animals which destroy grain, produce, young trees, and eggs of birds.

In order to correct such mistaken ideas the Department of Agriculture has made a most careful and accurate study of the habits of birds, and it is the results of these observations that are recorded here.

Field workers from this Department who have observed the habits of the principal birds that live among men, have watched them all day and from one day to another as they fed their little ones, and, to be more certain of their facts, they have examined the stomachs of hundreds of birds, both old and young, to learn exactly what each bird had eaten. In this way they have proved absolutely that many species that are supposed to eat chickens, or fruit or grain, in reality never touch them, but are among the farmer's best friends.

Among other things they have learned that while they are feeding their young, birds are especially valuable on a farm. Baby birds require food with a large amount of nourishment in it that can be easily digested. Almost all young birds have soft, tender stomachs, and must be fed on insects; as they grow older, the stomach or gizzard hardens and is capable of grinding hard grain or seeds. The amount of food required by the baby birds is astonishing. At certain stages of their growth they require more than their own weight in insects. And the young birds are to be fed just at the season that insects do the most injury to growing crops of grain and young fruit and vegetables.

Birds vary so much in the kind of food eaten, not only by different varieties of the same species, but by the same birds at different seasons, that it is necessary to make a careful study of each bird to know whether, if he is sometimes caught eating cultivated fruit and grains, he helps in other ways enough to pay for it.

When insects are unusually abundant, birds eat more than at other times and confine themselves more strictly to an insect diet, so that at such times the good they do is particularly valuable.

Birds of prey may do harm in a particular place, because in that region mice, rabbits and other natural food are scarce, and they are driven to feed on things that are useful to man, while in places where their natural food is plentiful the same birds are altogether helpful.

In the same way, birds which naturally eat weed seeds frequently find these almost altogether lacking where the farms are most carefully cultivated, but in their place are fields of grain whose seed also furnishes them desirable food. Is it any wonder, then, that, their natural food being taken from them, they turn to the cultivated crops? The fruit eating birds seem always to choose the wild fruits, but where these are not to be had they enter the orchards and soon become known as enemies of the farmer.