The house wren that warned the _Tribune_ reader when the grackles were about is often prized as a garden bird; it is bold, saucy in appearance, and a vigorous songster. But it is also well known as a quarrelsome bird, prone to punch holes in the eggs of its neighbors, and it also may fill up with sticks nesting boxes so that other birds cannot use them. The above was the gist of what I told Orr, and appeared in the May 5, 1950, _Tribune_. Thinking of it afterwards, as is usual, I thought of many other things I could have said, and perhaps made more clear that no bird is all good or all bad, from our human point of view. Their relationships with the rest of the landscape are complex. I like to see butterflies flit about my garden. But butterflies are caterpillars at one stage. And caterpillars may eat some of the things in my garden. But some birds feed on caterpillars. If I eliminate the caterpillars because they eat the plants I like, at one stroke I eliminate the source of the butterflies I like, and food for some birds I also like. Perhaps the partial answer, if answer there be in this imperfect world, is summed up by moderation: I can have some butterflies, some caterpillars, some plants, and some birds in my garden. If one becomes too abundant and interferes with the others, I prune it. Maintaining some sort of a balance, we can have some of each. BIRDS WASHING FOOD [Illustration] We not only wash ourselves and our clothes, but certain items of our food are regularly washed, as spinach, to get the sand out of it. Washing has been so important in our society that we've coined the term "Cleanliness is next to godliness." Possibly we've the snobbish idea it's a strictly human trait. Among other animals we don't expect to find water used for such cleanliness, and the raccoon, who does wash his food, is considered a sort of biological oddity. But when we come to birds we find a surprising number of them that wash their food. The dipper of our Western mountains in Oregon has been seen to wash insects and grubs before feeding them to the young birds. The parents held the food crosswise in the bill and the head was twisted rapidly from side to side in the water. Not until then was the food taken to the nest for the young. The scene shifts to Africa. Four buff-backed herons were feeding on a flooded lawn at Gezira, Egypt. One of the birds captured a large insect, apparently a large black beetle. Holding the insect in the tip of its bill, the bird walked to the water, immersed the beetle three times, shaking and fumbling with it the while, and then swallowing it.