The common blue-jay is accused of some very bad habits, among them eating the eggs and young of small birds. It is a fruit eater and also a grain eater and frequently robs corn-cribs and injures newly planted fields. However, it eats some insects, mice and other small enemies of the farmer and as it is nowhere very plentiful, and does not live in flocks, there is not much cause for complaint. However, its cousin, the California jay, has an extremely bad record. It is a great fruit eater, and devastates prune, apricot, and cherry orchards. It is a serious robber of the nests of small birds and hens, and though it eats some grasshoppers and a very few weed seeds, it is thoroughly disliked by western fruit growers. It should be greatly reduced in numbers. Another California bird that has gained a bad reputation is the house finch or linnet. It does serious harm in the cherry and apricot orchards, not so much by eating as by pecking at the fruit. It probably pecks, and thus destroys, five times as much fruit as it eats. As the bird is very abundant, it sometimes causes the loss of almost the entire crop of a small fruit grower. It does not deserve protection, for it eats the buds and blossoms of fruit trees and does little to compensate for all the harm done. Its best habit is eating woolly plant-lice. No article on birds would be complete that does not dwell on the enormous destruction of birds for trimming hats. As one writer puts it, we pay eight hundred million dollars a year for hat trimmings, assuming the insect ravages to be due to the killing of our birds for millinery purposes. While this is exaggerated, it is undoubtedly true that this is the largest cause of the destruction of the birds of America. The Audubon society says that we, as a nation, use 150,000,000 birds a year for trimming hats alone and that this single item would save our crops from insect destruction and largely rid our fields of weeds. If a few hundred dollars are stolen from a bank, the greatest efforts are made to catch the thief, and if possible to get the money back; but the great army of insects destroy each year, almost as much in money value as all the national banks in the country have on deposit, and this wholesale destruction might largely be prevented if every woman and girl took (and kept) a pledge not to use wings, breasts, or birds on her hats. There is no objection to the use of ostrich feathers, which are carefully plucked from the live birds. The feathers grow again, just as the wool grows on sheep that have been sheared. Neither is there any objection to using the feathers of the barn-yard fowls which are killed for food.