Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

All of these observations have been made by field workers from the Department of Agriculture, and no statement has been made that has not been proved by the examination of many bird stomachs at different seasons.

Highest of all in the list come the bluebirds. They are among the most beautiful of our native birds, with their bright blue coats and soft red breasts. They are sweet singers, and are among the first to return in the spring to tell us of the return of summer. In addition to this they have many good habits and absolutely no bad ones. More than three-fourths of their food consists of insects,—beetles, grasshoppers and caterpillars. The remainder is weed seeds and fruit, but there were no reports of cultivated fruits being eaten by bluebirds. On the contrary they eat the most undesirable of the wild fruit, chokeberry, pokeberry, Virginia creeper, bitter-sweet and sumac, as well as large quantities of ragweed seeds. Other birds are equally useful but none combines usefulness with so much beauty and sweetness of song.

The tiny wrens are another class of wholly useful birds. Their food consists almost entirely of insects with a very little grass-seed. They search every tree, shrub, and vine for caterpillars, spiders and grasshoppers.

Sparrows are almost equally useful. The tree sparrow, song sparrow, chipping sparrow, field sparrow and snowbird or junco are all great weed-seed destroyers. Many of them remain throughout the winter, when they feed entirely on the seeds of weeds. Each bird eats at least a quarter of an ounce of seeds per day, and they are often found by thousands in a region. At least a half dozen varieties of birds are feeding in the same ratio all over the country, reducing the crop of next year's weeds. During the summer they turn to a diet composed partly of insects and here again they help the farmer by eating the weevils, leaf-beetles, grasshoppers, bugs and wasps that infest his crops.

The various species of swallows rank high as insect-eating birds. The tree, bank, cliff and barn swallows and the purple martins all eat small beetles, mosquitoes, flying ants and other high-flying insects, and the number destroyed is almost beyond our power to imagine.

The most important service performed by swallows, however, is in the South, where they migrate for the winter. There they feed largely on the cotton boll-weevil, one of the most destructive of all insects, as we have seen. The Department of Agriculture is urging strongly that farmers in the North protect the swallows so that they may winter in the South in large numbers to feed on the boll-weevil, which, if allowed to flourish, will affect not only the southern planters, but every user of cotton goods, and every one who profits in any way by the sale and manufacture of cotton goods.

Among swallows, the beautiful and graceful purple martin is most worthy of protection. Both North and South, the swallows are among the most useful of all birds to the farmer and fruit grower, and should be protected from English sparrows and encouraged in every possible way.

The seventeen species of titmice which inhabit the United States, and many of which remain all winter, are all insect eaters to a great extent, eating large quantities of tent-caterpillars, moths and their eggs, weevils, including the cotton boll-weevil, plum-curculio, ants, spiders, plant-lice, bugs and beetles. They also eat small seeds, particularly those of the poison ivy.

The bush-tit feeds largely on insects that destroy grape-vines and on the black olive scale. Other species eat most of the scales which infest fruit and forest trees.

The rose-breasted grosbeak, while it eats a few green peas, is to be classed among the wholly beneficial birds, for it is the great natural destroyer of the Colorado potato beetle. In fact, it eats enough potato-bugs at a single meal to pay for all the peas eaten in a whole season. One family of grosbeaks, nesting near the field, will keep an entire patch cleared of potato-bugs throughout the season. In some parts of the country the grosbeak feeds largely on the plum scale, the hickory scale, the locust and oak scales and on the tulip scale, which is very destructive to shade trees. The black grosbeak is another variety that deserves encouragement in every way, for it eats the chrysalis of the codling-moth that is so serious a foe to our apple crop. It eats also many other injurious insects, such as wire-worms, many of the most harmful of beetles, caterpillars, and scales.