BIRDS, INSECTS, AND CROPS.
THE food of our small birds consists very largely of the insects which feed on the plants grown by the farmer. These insects multiply with such astounding rapidity that a single pair may in the course of one season be the progenitors of six billions of their kind. All through the season at which this insect life is most active, the birds are constantly at work destroying, for their young and for themselves, tens of thousands of hurtful creatures which, but for them, would swarm upon the farmer’s crops, and lessen the results of his labors. A painstaking and ardent naturalist not very long ago watched the nest of a pair of martins for sixteen hours, from 4 A.M. till 8 P.M., just to see how many visits the parent birds made to their young. He found that in that time 312 visits to the four young were made, 119 by the male and 193 by the female. If we suppose only six insects to have been brought at each visit, this pair of birds would have destroyed, for their young alone, in this one summer’s day, not far from 2,000 insects. The important relations which our birds bear to the agricultural interests, and so to the general welfare, are recognized by the governments of all our States. Laws exist for their protection, but these laws are rendered inoperative by the lack of an intelligent public sentiment to support them. They are nowhere enforced. It is for the interest of every one that such a public sentiment should be created. It is time that this destruction should be stopped.—Audubon Magazine.