They want more than three meals too. They need to eat very often. One catbird will take thirty grasshoppers for his breakfast, and in a few hours he will want thirty more. So he destroys a great many in a day.
Birds begin eating long before we are out of bed, and keep it up till night comes again, or as long as they can see.
You must not think the birds are greedy, as a person would be if he ate every few minutes all day. They are made to do so. It is their business to destroy insects, small animals, and weeds that trouble us so much, and the more they eat the better for us.
Let us see where they go for food. Each bird has his own place to work.
The catbird watches the fruit-trees, and all day long eats insects that are spoiling our fruit or killing the trees. When the cherries are ripe, we should not forget that he has saved the fruit from insects, and has well earned a share for himself.
If you spent days and weeks picking off insects, would you not think you had earned part of the fruit? "For every cherry he eats" (says a man who has watched him), "he has eaten at least one thousand insects."
The robin eats great numbers of cankerworms, which destroy our apples, and cutworms, which kill the corn.
The bluebird sits on the fence keeping sharp watch, and every few minutes flies down and picks up a grasshopper or a cricket, or some such grass-eating insect.
Woodpeckers hunt over the trunks and limbs of trees. They tap on the bark and listen, and if they hear a grub stir inside, they cut a hole in the bark and drag it out. The downy is fond of insects that infest our apple-trees, and he makes many holes in the trunks. But it does not hurt the trees. It is good for them, for it takes away the creatures that were eating them.
Orioles go over the fruit-trees, and pick out tiny insects under the leaves, and when they find great nests on the branches, they tear them open and kill the caterpillars that made them.