Page 249 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

ECONOMIC VALUE OF BIRDS 227
Surely no man of intelli- gence needs to be told to protect woodpeckers to the utmost, and to feed them in winter. Nail up fat pork, or large chunks of suet, on the south sides of conspicuous trees, and encourage the woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees and titmice to re- main in your woods through the long and dreary winter.
The English Sparrow is a nuisance and a pest, because it drives away from the house and the orchard the house wren, bluebird, phoebc, purple martin and swallow, any one of which is more valuable to man than a thousand English sparrows. I ne\'er yet have seen one of the pest sparrows catch an insect, but Chief Forester Merkel says that he has seen one catching and eating small moths.
There is one place in the country where English spar- rows have not yet come ; and whenever they do appear
there, they will meet a hostile reception.
comes,—for the sake of retaining the wrens, catbirds, phoebes and thrushesthatnowliterallymakehomehappyformyfamily. Agood way to discourage sparrows is to shoot them en masse when the}^ are feeding on road refuse, such as the white-throated, white-crowned and other sparrows never touch. Persistent destruction of their nests will check the nuisance.
The Shore Birds.—Who is there who thinks of the shore-birds as beingdirectlybeneficialtomanbyreasonoftheirfoodhabits? Iwar- rant not more than one man in every ten thousand ! We think of them only as possible "food." The amount of actual cash value benefit that the shore-birds confer upon man through the destruction of bad things is , in comparison with the number of birds, enormous.
The Department of Agriculture never publishes and circulates any- thing that has already been published, no matter how valuable to the public at large. Our rules arc dififercnt. Because I know that many
GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER
A Bird of Great Value to Orchards and Forests, now Rapidly Disappearing, Undoubtedly Through Slaughter as "Food"
I shall kill every one that