In winter, if you have an apple tree near your home, you can watch the
hungry woodpecker getting his dinner. He runs up the trunk, digging into
the bark for insects and insects' eggs. Almost seventy-five per cent of
his food is made up of insects.
Perhaps you have read of the army worm and of the harm it does to grass
and grain. In a single night a green field attacked by this pest is made
brown and bare. In 1896 the damage done in Massachusetts by this worm
was estimated at $200,000. As soon as the birds discover that the army
worm is at work, they come flocking from long distances. No farmer could
summon helpers so promptly. Kingbirds, phoebe birds, cowbirds, Baltimore
orioles, chipping sparrows, robins, English sparrows, meadow larks,
crows, golden-winged woodpeckers, and quail eat the army worm, but of
all these helpers, none is so valuable for this work as the red-winged
blackbird and the crow blackbird.
About fifty years ago, caterpillars were destroying an immense forest in
Europe, when suddenly a flock of cuckoos appeared and saved the
woodland. During the great locust invasion of our own western country,
when the farmers had given up the battle, an army of birds would
sometimes alight upon a field and save the crop.
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