The codling moth larvae are already at work on the apples. The leaves affected by the witch hazel gall fly are being cut off and burned. These are merely the most conspicuous of the insect pests that I now see daily. I am not counting those of second or third-rate importance. Some of these hordes are being fought with poisonous sprays, some are being killed by hand, and some are being ignored. In view of the known value of the remaining trees of our country, each woodpecker in the United States is worth twenty dollars in cash. Each nuthatch, creeper and chickadee is worth from five to ten dollars, according to local circumstances. You might just as well cut down four twenty-inch trees and let them lie and decay, as to permit one woodpecker to be killed and eaten by an Italian in the North, or a negro in the South. The downy woodpecker is the relentless enemy of the codling moth, an insect that annually inflicts upon our apple crop damages estimated by the experts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture at twelve million dollars! Now, is a federal strong-arm migratory bird law needed for such birds or not? Let the owners of orchards and forests make answer. THE CASE OF THE CODLING MOTH AND CURCULIO.--The codling moth and curculio are twin terrors to apple-growers, partly because of their deadly destructiveness, and partly because man is so weak in resisting them. The annual cost of the fight made against them, in sprays and labor and apparatus, has been estimated at $8,250,000. And what do the birds do to the codling moth,--when there are any birds left alive to operate? The testimony comes from all over the United States, and it is worth while to cite it briefly as a fair sample of the work of the birds upon this particularly deadly pest. These facts and quotations are from the "Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture," for 1911. [Illustration: DOWNY WOODPECKER] _The Downy Woodpecker_ is the champion tree-protector, and also one of the greatest enemies of the codling moth. When man is quite unable to find the hidden larvae, Downy locates it every time, and digs it out. It extracts worms from young apples so skillfully that often the fruit is not permanently injured. Mr. F.M. Webster reports that the labors of this bird "afford actual and immediate relief to the infected fruit." Testimony in favor of the downy woodpecker has come from New York, New Jersey, Texas and California, "and no fewer than twenty larvae have been taken from a single stomach."