What Birds Eat

        Some farmers do not like a good many or the birds because they eat growing crops and fruit. They see the damage done by the birds, but they do not always see that these same birds more than pay the farmer for all they destroy. There are more than 300,000 kinds of insects; not all of these varieties live in America, but thousands of them are found on every farm, and many are very injurious to crops. Without the birds many crops would be ruined each year. There are some kinds of caterpillars that in twenty-four hours eat more than a hundred times their own weight in food; one scarlet tanager, a beautiful red bird, has been known in eighteen minuets to eat 630 caterpillars. The tanagers eat little fruit, but do you not think they earn it? There may be a million plant lice on a single tree; the birds destroy thousands of these in a single day. Army worms are dreaded by the farmers, and so are tussock moths and many small beetles, like potato bugs; birds eat these by the million; if they did not, our crops would not be half as large as they are.

       The rose-breasted grosbeak eats so many potato bugs that in some sections it is called the ''potato-bug bird.'' One pair of brown thrashers will destroy 60,000 insects in one season; a dozen pairs of wrens and their young in a season will eat fully one hundred twenty-five pounds of insects. Can people not afford to lose a few cherries and other fruit in exchange for the constant warfare of the birds against these insect pests?

Jo Alwood talks about Rose-brested Grosbeak.

       The stories about the quantity of food a bird eats may seem to you like fairy tales, but they are true. You have noticed that birds are always active-always flying or hopping about. You know that when you play hard you get very hungry. Birds are always hungry because of their constant activity, and their great problem is to keep supplied with food. Then too, when the baby birds are hatched-from two to five in a nest-there are more hungry mouths to feed. Little birds grow very rapidly, and so they require a great deal to eat. Have you ever watched the mother and father birds feeding their young? Does it appear that the little ones ever get enough to eat? The heads of a bird family are about the busiest things out of doors until their young are able to hunt their own food.

       When you were a baby your father and mother protected you with loving care. Bird parents show just the same attention to their little ones. They are tireless in bringing to them the almost unbelievable amount of food they require; they watch over them while they are helpless, and protect them even at the risk of their lives from all bird enemies; they keep the naked little bodies warm until they are covered with feathers, and when grown strong enough they teach them to fly. Within a few weeks the little ones are on the wing, and soon they begin to prepare homes of their own. Some kinds of birds will raise four broods of little ones in a season. Leonard and Hill