The Children's Book of Birds

by Olive Thorne Miller

Besides the work they do for us in destroying animal life, their seed-eating is almost as useful. As I said, they eat the seeds of weeds that farmers and gardeners are all the time laboring to keep down, so that useful plants may have a chance to grow.

The whole family of finches, sparrows, buntings, grosbeaks, and all birds with the high, thick bill, though they eat largely of insects through the summer, and feed their nestlings on them, when insects get scarce and weed seeds are ripe, turn to the latter for food. They eat the seeds of all kinds of troublesome weeds; and as each single seed might produce a plant, we cannot guess how much they destroy.

Professor Beal, who is at the head of this government inquiry into the food of birds, and who knows what he is talking about, says that one species of little bird—the tree sparrow—destroys every year in one of the Western States, many tons of the seeds of weeds.

There is a curious and interesting fact about this seed-eating. The regular seed-eaters, the finches, prefer the seeds of certain weeds, most of them harmful; these they break up, taking off the shells, and of course destroying the germ, making it impossible for them to grow.

But there are many birds who eat berries having in them seeds, such as raspberries, blackberries, and all kinds of wild fruit. These birds do not crack the seeds; and, as they are hard, they do not digest in the stomach, but are dropped whole, and are ready to grow wherever they fall.

Thus, while seed-eating birds destroy the weeds which are hurtful, the fruit-eaters plant the seeds of berries and fruit which we like. That is why we find wild berry bushes all over the country. We have to thank the birds for it.

A great deal more could be said about the birds' work for us, not only of the robins and those I have spoken of, but cedar-birds, who are shot because they take part of our cherries, blackbirds, because they eat some grain, orioles, because they occasionally take green peas, and kingbirds, because they have the name of eating bees, though it has been proved that they eat only drones, which have no sting and make no honey.

Let me impress upon you two facts. First, the stories of the harm done by birds are often mere guesswork, from careless observation. For instance, a man seeing a bird going over his blossoming fruit-trees, at once concludes he is destroying the fruit, probably shoots him, and then writes to his favorite paper that a certain bird eats fruit buds. Other papers copy it, and a war against that bird begins in every orchard.

Whereas, the truth is, the bird was preserving the fruit by picking out the insects that would have spoiled it. This is no fancy picture; this very thing has happened more than once.

And again, whatever is said about the harm this or that bird does, never forget this second fact, which I repeat, and which may be relied upon as perfectly trustworthy. The officers of the government of the United States, who have carefully studied the matter and found out positively, without guesswork, what birds eat, have declared emphatically that every bird they have examined does more good by destroying pests, than harm to our crops, excepting only the bird we have imported,—the English or house sparrow.