Olive Thorne Miller, in her fascinating little book, "The First Book of Birds," speaking of how the birds work for us, says: "Chickadees like to eat the eggs of cankerworms; and for a single meal one of these tiny birds will eat two hundred and fifty eggs, and he will take several meals a day. Now, cankerworms destroy our apples. When they get into an orchard in force, it looks, as Miss Merriam says, as if it had been burned over. Robins, cat-birds, and shrikes, and several others, like to eat cutworms, which destroy grass and other plants. As many as three hundred of them have been found in the stomach of a robin, of course for one meal. Ants are very troublesome in many ways, and three thousand of them have been taken from the stomach of one flicker."
Why kill these birds that are so useful to us and so beautify nature? Many others are just as useful and some that occasionally do damage amply repay us in other ways.
| ||
| THE CALICO BASS. (Pomoxys sparoides.) | COPYRIGHT 1900, BY A. W. MUMFORD, CHICAGO. | |
THE CALICO BASS.
The Calico Bass (Pomoxys sparoides) is so called because of the mottled and variegated coloring of the body and fins. It is also called the Strawberry Bass, the Grass Bass, the Bitter Head, the Lamp-lighter and the Barfish.
It is abundant in all the lakes and ponds of the region of the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi river, where it shows a preference for quiet, cool and clear water and grass covered bottoms.