The Kansas City sun. (Kansas City, Mo.) 1908-1924, 1916-06-03

M downy woodpecker, phoebe, chickadee.
~ barn swallow, purple martin and chip
AM ping sparrow.
~0 Having given the names of the ten
birds over whose good deeds man should
rejoice the ornithologist said, But the list is
longer. There are other birds and many of
them, that work as hard or nearly as hard for
man as those which l have named. Between
80 and 40 species there is small room for choice.
but let the ten stand because the list perhaps
cannot be improved upon"
Later the scientist wanted to hedge a little,
for he said that there were some birds Of prey
which at least should have a place side by side
with the famtliars of orchard and garden to
which he had given first rank. The cause of the
olrds OF prey, however, has been pleaded before.
The barn owl, the sparrow hawk and some
others have been given their credit marks, but
1t is to be doubted. perhaps, If anything which
can be said in behalf of a predatory one which
occasionally picks up a chicken will serve to
save its life when ii is caught in the act of lar
ceny. Not one of the birds in the Table of Ten
is a thief. Honest, wellmeaning, cheerful, and
for the mosS part neighborly, they go through
their lives working, which means eating, in order
that man more fully may reap what he has sown.
1t is admittedly probable that some close stu
dents of the habits of birds may dispute the &C.
curacy of the list as it is given, but it is not
likely that anyone who has watched the daily
operations of these friends in feathers from night
haWk to chipping sparrow will be able to prove
that so much as one black mark should be entered
on the daily records of their lives.
BY their appetites We shall know them. A bird
is good or bad from the agriculturists' viewpoint
according to what and how much it eats. This
is a plain tale of the birds bill of fare. 1t is
lucky, perhaps, for the s%ongsters. as we'll as for
the tuneless ones, that the birds of the best
habits of life are well known by sight to all
Americans. The trouble that the bird protectors
have found lies almost wholly in the fact that
the habits Of birds are not as well known as
the birds themselves.
1t was DR.. A. K. Fisher of the Biological Sur
ivey who named the ten most useful birds. He
is in charge of economic Investigations" IN the
Bureau of the Biological Survey of the Depart
ment Of Agriculture. In the bureau are kept
the bird records. The papers in the pigeon holes
in part read like the catalogues of a seed store
and the collection lists of an entomologist. One
can say of the birds that seeds and insects form
the chief of their diet"
To go to the mammals for a figure of speech
It has taken years of closest work and field work
to separate the sheep from the goats. In the
bird world there are many more sheep than there
are goats, but the job of separation has been
hard. In the little flock of best friends of the
farmer there are only two birds which, perhaps.
are not we'll known to all suburban jewellers. The
two are the killdeer plover and the ~yellow-billed
cuckoo. The nighthawk. which heads the list,
is, or ought to be, known to everybody. OF course
it is not a hawk at all, and the name by which
It is known in the North ern states, has hurt 1t.
Paraphrasing 1t might be said, Give a bird a
bad name and it will shoo OF it." In the Southern
states the nighthawk is known as the bullbat.
In the fall and winter 1t is killed ruthlessly and
to no purpose except that Of so-called sport, for
It is useless. or virtually useless as food.
Nighthawks are wholly insectivorous. They do
no damage to crops. F. E. L. Beal, who has
made field studies for the Biological Survey of
the dietary of virtually all the commoner birds,
says of the food of the nighthawk, True bugs,
moths. flies, grasshoppers and crickets are i'm
portant elements OF it's food. Several species of
mosquitoes. including the transmitter of malaria.
are eaten. Other well-known pests consumed
by the nighthawk are Colorado potato beetles.
cucumber beetles. rice, clover-leaf and cotton
boil weevils. bill bugs, bark beetles, squash bugs
and moths OF the cotton worm"
The killdeer plover is one of the noisy birds.
A part of its Latin name is "Vociferus," which
speaks for itself. While the killdeer ordinarily
is accounted a game bird it is poor eating. The
good that it does should save 1t from persecu-
ton, but gunners are not apt to discriminate,
and so the killdeer frequently suffers. This bird
lives in the open country. More than 80 per
cent of Its food consists of animal matter. The
record shows: Beetles, 37.06 per cent; other in
sects, as grasshoppers, caterpillars, ants, bugs,
caddis flies. dragon flies and two-winged flies,
1884 per cent, and other Invertebrates as cent?
pedes, spiders, ticks. oyster worms. ~rthworm
snaiis, crabs and other c~rustacea, 21.12 per cent.
Vegetable matter composes 2.2S per cent of the
total food, and Is chiefly made up of weedseeds,
such as buttonweed, smartweed, foxtail grass and
nightshade. The alfalfa weeyil. a new and de-