Page 243 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

ECONOMIC VALUE OF BIRDS 221
THE BOB-WHITE
For the Smaller Pests of the Farm, This Bird is the Most Marvelous Engine of Destruction Ever put Together of Flesh and Blood
A few sample meals of insects.—The following are records of single individual meals of the bob white
Of grasshoppers, 84; chinch bugs, 100; squash bugs, 12; army worm, 12; cut-worm, 12; mosquitoes, 568 in three hours ; cotton boll weevil, 47; flies, 1,350; roseslugs,1,286. Miscel- laneous insects consumed byalayinghenquail, 1,532, of which 1,000 were grass- hoppers; total weigh of the lot, 24.6 grams.
"F. M. Howard, of Beeville, Texas, wrote to the U.S. Bureau of Ento- mology, thatthebobwhites shot in his vicinity had their crops filled with the weevils. Another farmer reported his cotton fields full of quail, and an en- tire absence of weevils." Texas and Georgia papers (please copy.)
And yet, because of its few pitiful ounces of flesh, two million gunners and ten thousand lawmakers think of the quail only as a bird that can be shot and
eaten! Throughout a great portion of its former range, including New York and New Jersey, the species is surely and certainly on the verge of total extinction. And yet sportsmen gravely discuss the "bag limit," and "enforcement of the bag-limit law" as a means of bringing back this almost vanished species! Such folly in grown men is very trying.
To my friend, the Epicure:—The next time you regale a good appetite with blue points, terrapin stew, filet of sole and saddle of mutton, touched up here and there with the high lights of rare old sherry, rich claret and dry monopole, pause as the dead quail is laid before you, on a funeral pyre of toast, and consider this: "Here lies the charred remains of the Farmer's Ally and Friend, poor Bob White. In life he devoured 145 different kinds of bad insects, and the seeds of 129 anathema weeds. For the smaller pests of the farm, he was the most marvelous engine of
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