Among the most useful birds, we must mention the phoebe, which nests near houses and lives almost entirely on harmful insects which it catches on the wing.
Night hawks eat flying ants in great numbers, as many as eighteen hundred having been found in a single stomach. They eat insects that fly by night and are classed among our most useful birds.
Quails are almost unequalled as weed-destroyers. Throughout the fall and winter they spend the time destroying weed seeds. In summer they eat Colorado potato beetles, chinch-bugs, cotton boll-weevils, squash-beetles, grasshoppers and cutworms. The mother quail, with her family of twelve to twenty little ones, patrols the fields thoroughly for insects. Quails should be prized as among a farmer's most valuable helpers and protected at all seasons.
Similar in the good work it does is the meadow-lark. Grasshoppers, caterpillars and cutworms form a large part of its diet, and its vegetable food consists of weed seeds or waste grain.
King-birds are useful in protecting poultry and song birds from hawks, and are also great fly catchers, taking many beetles on the wing.
Doves eat great quantities of seeds of harmful weeds. They also eat some grain, but almost altogether after the crop has been gathered. Old damaged corn and single grains scattered along the roads are eaten, but there is no complaint of doves doing injury to fields of growing grain.
The orioles are beautiful, are sweet singers, and no exception can be taken to their food habits. Caterpillars are their principal article of food, but plant-and bark-lice, spiders and other insects are also eaten. Orioles do not eat much vegetable food. They have been accused of eating peas and grapes, but there seems no evidence to show that this habit is general.
The food habits of cuckoos render them very desirable, since they eat hairy caterpillars, particularly tent-caterpillars, for which they seem to have an especial fondness, fall web-worms and locusts, besides other injurious insects, but they are accused of bad habits in relation to other birds, and can therefore hardly be classed among the wholly useful birds. Warblers and vireos are among the most helpful birds in an orchard, devouring large quantities of insects.
There is no class of birds concerning which it is more necessary that the farmer should be well informed, than the hawks and owls, since some of them are wholly good, and of the greatest possible benefit to him and the fruit grower, while others are extremely harmful in their food habits.
The harmful varieties live almost entirely on poultry and wild birds, and include the goshawk or partridge hawk and the Cooper hawk, which is a true chicken-hawk and should be recognized by all farmers at sight.