[Illustration: GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER A Bird of Great Value to Orchards and Forests, now Rapidly Disappearing, Undoubtedly Through Slaughter as "Food"] Surely no man of intelligence needs to be told to protect woodpeckers to the utmost, and to _feed them in winter_. Nail up fat pork, or large chunks of suet, on the south sides of conspicuous trees, and encourage the woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees and titmice to remain in your woods through the long and dreary winter. THE ENGLISH SPARROW is a nuisance and a pest, because it drives away from the house and the orchard the house wren, bluebird, phoebe, purple martin and swallow, any one of which is more valuable to man than a thousand English sparrows. I never yet have seen one of the pest sparrows catch an insect, but Chief Forester Merkel says that he has seen one catching and eating small moths. There is one place in the country where English sparrows have not yet come; and whenever they do appear there, they will meet a hostile reception. I shall kill every one that comes,--for the sake of retaining the wrens, catbirds, phoebes and thrushes that now literally make home happy for my family. A good way to discourage sparrows is to shoot them en masse when they are feeding on road refuse, such as the white-throated, white-crowned and other sparrows never touch. Persistent destruction of their nests will check the nuisance. THE SHORE BIRDS.--Who is there who thinks of the shore-birds as being directly beneficial to man by reason of their food habits? I warrant not more than one man in every ten thousand! We think of them only as possible "food." The amount of actual cash value benefit that the shore-birds confer upon man through the destruction of bad things is, in comparison with the number of birds, enormous. The Department of Agriculture never publishes and circulates anything that has already been published, no matter how valuable to the public at large. Our rules are different. Because I know that many of the people of our country need the information, I am going to reprint here, as an object lesson and a warning, the whole of the Biological Survey's valuable and timely circular No. 79, issued April 11, 1911, and written by Prof. W.L. McAtee. It should open the eyes of the American people to two things: the economic value of these birds, and the fact that they are everywhere far on the road toward extermination! * * * * * OUR VANISHING SHOREBIRDS By Prof. W.L. McAtee The term shorebird is applied to a group of long-legged, slender-billed, and usually plainly colored birds belonging to the order Limicolae. More than sixty species of them occur in North America. True to their name they frequent the shores of all bodies of water, large and small, but many of them are equally at home on plains and prairies.