If we take pains to water our birds during the dry seasons they will be much less apt to seek this supply from the juices of fruits that are so temptingly near at hand. Place little pans of water in the orchard and vineyard where the birds can visit them without fear of being seized by the house cat or knocked over by a missile from the alert "small boy," and I am sure that the injury to fruit, to a great extent at least, will cease.
Recent investigations tend to prove that the Grackle or Crow-Blackbird does more good than harm and should be protected.
Our Sparrows and their allies, taken together, form a very extensive family of very beautiful as well as useful birds. Like the warblers, they occupy themselves with searching for and destroying insects all summer long; but this is not all they do that is good. In fall, winter, and early spring, when Mother Earth has lost her brilliant green and rests in sombre browns or beneath ice and snow, the longspurs, Snow Bunting, Snowbird, and some of the sparrows that have remained with us are busily engaged in gathering for themselves a living. They hop and fly about from place to place searching for and picking up little seeds of grass, grain and weeds, of shrubs and trees, and appropriating the same to their use, chirping merrily as they work away. The European House Sparrow, or the English Sparrow as it is more commonly called, has the worst reputation of the entire family. But even this bird has some redeeming traits.
The Tanagers are insect destroyers, feeding for the most part on such forms as attack the foliage of trees.
All of our Swallows are insect destroyers, capturing such forms as gnats, flies, etc., which they seize while on the wing. The large colonies of different species of these birds that breed within the state, as well as those that pass through during their migrations, destroy great numbers of these insects. They should be protected.
The Waxwings, both the Cedar Bird and Bohemian Waxwing, feed principally upon berries, etc., which they find throughout the year. Still, in his studies of the food contents of the stomachs of a variety of birds taken in a certain orchard that was overrun with canker worms, Professor Forbes found that the seven specimens of the Ceder Waxwing had eaten nothing but canker-worms and a few dung beetles, the latter in such small numbers as to scarcely count. The number of caterpillars eaten by each bird ranged from 70 to 101.
