The Dawson news. (Dawson, Ga.) 1889-current, 1916-07-12
What Bird Life Means TO Us
By Ell Comancho in Our Dumb Animals.

! Bird life, meaning the common wild birds
with which every country boy is familiar,
from the old black crow to the meadow lark,
blackbird, bobolink, and all the rest of the
song-birds is of much more value each year
to the people of the United States than the
biggest railroad system in the country. That
may seem to he a pretty broad statement,
yet it falls far short of stating the actual
facts.
The agricultural department of the United
States government has kept tab on the birds,
what they do, what they eat every day In the
year, and what their habits are, until now
their lives are an open book. This work,
done by the biological survey, has brought
out some very astonishing things besides
natural history, for it has been so thoroughly
and so painstakingly done that not only is
the list of foods for each bird for the entire
year accurately tabulated but the average
bulk amount of each kind of food is known
so closely that values in dollars and cents
can be reckoned, and thus the actual live
value to the nation of each individual bird
be easily computed.
For forty years l have made it part of
my daily life to watch and study all nature,
and especially to study our common song
birds. This has given me great volume of
accurate information so that have for years
had a very good working idea of the value
of birds as insect and weed seed deStroyers.
1t remained for the biological survey,
however, to get these things down to scien-
tific accuracy because, where | was only one
man, they put hundreds of observers into the
field and thus were able to carry on sys-
tenn of espionage that covered every state in
the union simultaneously. In addition to
this they were able to bring in expert scien-
tific observers and laboratory men whose
life business is the study of bugs, good, bad
and Indifferent. This system was organized
and the laboratory men began to examine
the crops of birds sent in by hunters from
all over the country
Immediately things began to happen; GER
tain insects were found lin whole specimens
and fragments) in the crops of many birds;
certain other insects were found only in the
crops of certain birds. Some crops contain
ed only weed seed of one kind and another;
others contained a great mixture of seeds of
various weeds, and many others contained
both seeds and bugs.
The strangest thing developed by this
work was that robins and certain other
birds, long accused of being fruit eaters and
therefore detrimental to mankind, were alb
solutely cleared of the charge because their
diet is almost entirely insects with only here
and there cherry Every robin is entitled
to the few cherries he eats because without
him there would be no cherries for any
body, for he destroys the insects that destroy
cherries, and when he is in the cherry tree
he is eating more insects than cherries
Many other supposed-to-b harmful birds
were found to be just as helpful, and there
is no guesswork about it now!
The common Bob-White quail, killed all
over the country for sport, is worth each
year considerably more than his own weight
in pure gold because he destroys harmful
insects Qike the potato bug, chinch bug, and
others) enough to save more than the value
of his own weight in gold in crops for the
farmer. Remember that each and every
quail is worth that for bug-destroying alone,
to say nothing of the weed seeds he destroys
on top of that, so the farmer with flock
of quails on his land should protect them
because in doing so he is saving money for
himself and the crop supply for all.
if it were not for the common forked-tail
swallow we could not raise a cotton crop in
the United States, simply because the food
of the swallow in its migrations over the cot
ton belt is the cotton boil weevil, and the
bird eats the insect in the moth or egg lay
ing stage, so he strikes the weevil in the
weakest spot.
There is not one single wild bird of any
species (not even excepting hawks and owls
long killed on sight by everybody but what
is of very great value to man, and every
man, woman and child should protect every
bird because it means tremendous crop in
crease to us all.