XII
WHAT HE EATS
What the bird eats and where he gets his food are useful things for us to know. It has only lately been found out that birds are the most valuable of helpers to us.
What we cannot eat ourselves, they are happy to live on, and things that make us a great deal of trouble are their daily food.
Some of the things they are fond of are little animals, like mice and ground squirrels, that eat our crops. Others are insects which spoil our fruit and eat up our vegetables, cankerworms and cutworms, and a hundred more.
Besides these, many birds eat the seeds of certain weeds that farmers have to fight all the time.
One reason this helps us so greatly is that birds eat much more for their size than we do. A boy of six or eight years could not possibly eat a whole sheep in one day, but a young bird can easily eat more than his own weight every day.