Virginia citizen. (Irvington, Va.) 1891-1921, 1903-05-29
A PLEA FOR BIRDS.


Are you familiar with the cbm-
mon birds around you? Do Won
know anything of their life. food.
beauties, songs and their usefulness
to mankind?
That birds do us some injury is
very we'll known, but few are familiar
with the great amount of good they
do, or surely so many of them would
not be killed.
OF all birds the woodpecker is per-
haps the most useful to US because he
is the natural guardian of our fruit
and forest trees. Do you think he is
inJuring the trees when You see him
pecking into them? He is not. but
is hunting for the larvae of the wood i.
borer, coddling moths and mans
other insects which are buried be-
meath the bark.
But what harm do these insects
do? The wood-borers bore into the
trunks and branches of trees, killing
the young buds, one often being suf.
ticient to kill an entire tree. The
larv@ of the coddling moth ipiure
our fruits by boring into them and
afterwards bury themselves, wrapped
IN their cocoons beneath the bark of
the tree.
The family food of the flicker.
one of the woodpeckers, is ants, as
many as three thousand having been
found In the stomach of one bird.
The ants do great harm by taking
care of plant lice.
They take the eggs of the lice into
their own nests In winter and care
for them, taking them when they
hatch to the leaves of trees and
plants on which they feed. The ants
do this because the lice excrete a
sweet fluid which they like, and so
We say the ants have cows.
Only one of the woodpeckers, the
sapsucker, ever does any real harm.
and he more than compensates for il
by the great number of insects he
eats.
Some other insect eating birds are
the hycatchers, orioles, humming
olrds, tanagers, waxwings, vircos,
thrushes, wrens, cuckoos, swallows.
shrlkes, creepers and bluebirds.
Are you troubled with the potato
beetle There is no better way to
get rid of them than to have some
grosbeaks living near your potato
patch. Do caterpillars build their
tents in your trees? If so you need
some cuckoos, orioles and chickadees
to eat them.
But do not some of these birds and
the robin also eat our fruits They
do eat some of the earliest fruits
which rippen at time when their
appetite is sharpened by long con-
tlnued diet of insects and worms.
Birds prefer wild fruit, aud after it
ripens seldom touch the fruit in our
orchards. But if they should, could
we not afford to give them some of
the fruit of the trees that they have
protected from destructive insects ?
The blue jay is often accused of
eating the eggs aud young of other
birds but this is u very, very rare oc-
currence. He is, indeed, useful
bird, eating great many obnoxious
insects and grasshoppers also. Ills
tavorite food is mast, acorns, chest
nuts, ETC., and when be can get these
he cares for little else.
The majority of the birds of prey
labor night and day to destroy vora-
cious rodents, the enemies of the hus-
bandman, and yet they are prosecuted
increasingly because of the harm
done by only few species.
Why is it that we do not have more
blrdss Because of their enemies,
man, cats, and the English sparrow,
Man kills them not only for sport
but kills millions of them eyery wear
for millinery purposes. Each cat on
the average, is responsible for the
death of fifty song birds year. The
English sparrows break up the nests
of other birds and drive them away.
and for this reason they should be
killed.
Birds are also valuable to us from
an intellectual and aesthetic stand
point, but are mos. valuable, as has
already been shown, from the eco-
nomic standpoint. 1t may be an
easy enough matter to exterminate
the birds, but it is extremely difficult
to control the insect pests. "For
this work We have vast mechanism
in nature, an army plastic almost as
arr, on wings powerful and beautiful,
able to carry their flying squadons
hundreds and even thousands of miles
where food abonnds and insects
threaten destruction to vegetation"