Page 245 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

ECONOMIC VALUE OF BIRDS 223
the rosr-bre.-xsted grosbeak
"The Potato-bug Bird, ' Greatest Enemy of the Potato Beetles From the 'American Natural History"
little creatures that do their work so quietly you hardly notice them. All you see in your tree-tops is a two- foot flit or glide, now here and now there, as the leaves and high branches are combed of their insect life.
Bulletin No. 44 of the Department of Agriculture gives the residuum of an exhausting examination of 3,398 warbler stomachs, from seventeen species of l)irds, and the result is: 94.99 per cent of insect food,—mostly bad insects, too,—and 5.01 per cent vegetablefood. Whatmore can anv forester ask of a bird?
The Sparrows.—All our sparrows are great con- stniiers of weed seeds. Pro- fessor Beal has calculated the total quantity con- sumed in low^a in one year, —in the days when spar- rows were normally numer- ous,—at 1,750,000 pounds.
The AiMERicAN Goldfinch as a weed destroyer has few equals. It makes a specialty of the seeds of the members of the Order Compositae, and is especially fond of the seeds of ragweed, thistles, wild lettuce and wildsimflower. But,smallandbeautifulasthisbirdis,therearehtmdreds of thousands of grown men in America who would shoot it and eat it if they dared!
The Hawks and Owls.—Let no other state repeat the error that once was made in Pennsylvania when that state enacted in 1885, her now famous hawk-and-owl bounty law. In order to accomplish the wholesale destruction of her birds of prey, a law was passed providing for the payment of a bounty of fifty cents each for the scalps of hawks and owls. Immediately the slaughter began. In two years 180,000 scalps were brought in, and $90,000 were paid out for them. It was estimated that the saving to the farmers in poultry amounted to one dollar for each $1,205 paid out in bounties.
The awakening came even more swiftly than the ornithologists ex- pected. Bytheendoftwoyearsfromthepassageof"thehavv'klaw,"