Robins, catbirds, and shrikes, and several others, like to eat cutworms, which destroy grass and other plants. As many as three hundred of them have been found in the stomach of one robin, of course for one meal. Ants are very troublesome in many ways, and three thousand of them have been taken from the stomach of one flicker. Rats and mice, ground squirrels and gophers, make great havoc in our crops, and farmers spend much time and labor trying to get rid of them; but these creatures are the favorite food of most hawks and owls. If the farmer would stop shooting the birds, and protect them instead, they would do this work for him, and much better than he can. But because (as I said in a former chapter) one or two hawks and owls have a taste for chickens, he generally kills every hawk and owl he sees, and for this folly has to spend half his time trying to kill the little animals they would gladly have eaten. A great deal of refuse, dead sea creatures, and other matter, is thrown up on the seashore, or floats on the water. On this feed the water birds,--herons, gulls, terns, and others. If this were not disposed of, it would make us sick. Indeed, on the shores where so many herons have been killed, to get their plumes for ladies' hats, the result has been sickness and death among the people, as Dr. Gaumer, of Yucatan, told Mr. Chapman. Besides the work they do for us in destroying animal life, their seed-eating is almost as useful. As I said, they eat the seeds of weeds that farmers and gardeners are all the time laboring to keep down, so that useful plants may have a chance to grow. The whole family of finches, sparrows, buntings, grosbeaks, and all birds with the high, thick bill, though they eat largely of insects through the summer, and feed their nestlings on them, when insects get scarce and weed seeds are ripe, turn to the latter for food. They eat the seeds of all kinds of troublesome weeds; and as each single seed might produce a plant, we cannot guess how much they destroy. Professor Beal, who is at the head of this government inquiry into the food of birds, and who knows what he is talking about, says that one species of little bird--the tree sparrow--destroys every year in one of the Western States, many tons of the seeds of weeds. There is a curious and interesting fact about this seed-eating. The regular seed-eaters, the finches, prefer the seeds of certain weeds, most of them harmful; these they break up, taking off the shells, and of course destroying the germ, making it impossible for them to grow. But there are many birds who eat berries having in them seeds, such as raspberries, blackberries, and all kinds of wild fruit. These birds do not crack the seeds; and, as they are hard, they do not digest in the stomach, but are dropped whole, and are ready to grow wherever they fall.