Checking the Waste: A Study in ConservationGregory, Mary Huston
History
Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation
Gregory, Mary Huston
Conservation of natural resources; United States -- Economic conditions
The rose-breasted grosbeak, while it eats a few green peas, is to be
classed among the wholly beneficial birds, for it is the great natural
destroyer of the Colorado potato beetle. In fact, it eats enough
potato-bugs at a single meal to pay for all the peas eaten in a whole
season. One family of grosbeaks, nesting near the field, will keep an
entire patch cleared of potato-bugs throughout the season. In some parts
of the country the grosbeak feeds largely on the plum scale, the hickory
scale, the locust and oak scales and on the tulip scale, which is very
destructive to shade trees. The black grosbeak is another variety that
deserves encouragement in every way, for it eats the chrysalis of the
codling-moth that is so serious a foe to our apple crop. It eats also
many other injurious insects, such as wire-worms, many of the most
harmful of beetles, caterpillars, and scales.
Among the most useful birds, we must mention the phoebe, which nests
near houses and lives almost entirely on harmful insects which it
catches on the wing.
Night hawks eat flying ants in great numbers, as many as eighteen
hundred having been found in a single stomach. They eat insects that fly
by night and are classed among our most useful birds.
Quails are almost unequalled as weed-destroyers. Throughout the fall and
winter they spend the time destroying weed seeds. In summer they eat
Colorado potato beetles, chinch-bugs, cotton boll-weevils,
squash-beetles, grasshoppers and cutworms. The mother quail, with her
family of twelve to twenty little ones, patrols the fields thoroughly
for insects. Quails should be prized as among a farmer's most valuable
helpers and protected at all seasons.
Similar in the good work it does is the meadow-lark. Grasshoppers,
caterpillars and cutworms form a large part of its diet, and its
vegetable food consists of weed seeds or waste grain.
King-birds are useful in protecting poultry and song birds from hawks,
and are also great fly catchers, taking many beetles on the wing.
Doves eat great quantities of seeds of harmful weeds. They also eat some
grain, but almost altogether after the crop has been gathered. Old
damaged corn and single grains scattered along the roads are eaten, but
there is no complaint of doves doing injury to fields of growing grain.
The orioles are beautiful, are sweet singers, and no exception can be
taken to their food habits. Caterpillars are their principal article of
food, but plant-and bark-lice, spiders and other insects are also eaten.
Orioles do not eat much vegetable food. They have been accused of eating
peas and grapes, but there seems no evidence to show that this habit is
general.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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