ECONOMIC RELATIONS OF OUR BIRDS.


Table showing the kinds and number of insects, cray-fish and earth-worms
eaten
by the American Starlings - continued.
NUMBER AND NAME OF SPECI-  CLASSIFICATO0N  RATIOS REPRESENTED BY LINES.
mENs EXAMINED.         OF FOOD.
1     8  Moths. ........ .
1.   7  8BMotles ....... ......  .
Of five Rusty Grackles  a  7 Beetles.
examined ...........  1  2  Snails .... ......
3     17 Adult forms......
1     2 Beetles .
1     2 Water Scorpions .
Id
i1    1 Cray-fish .........
Of Dine Pu~rple      ,
Grackles examined. 4 .   Ad forms.
0
1     2 Larvo............
1     10 Insect eggs .......
111. DOLICHONYX ORYZIVORUS (LINN.), Sw. BOBOLINK; REED-BIRD; RICE-
BIRD. GROUP I. CLASS b.
From the first till the middle of May these northward-moving night-travelers
are spirited into our meadows out of the impending darkness, some to select
summer homes, but many more to feed and rest and then hurry to the Saskatch-
ewan country, as if anxious to cut short the time when they may return to
the
sunny south; and true to their instincts, early in August they come trooping
back, and, joined by those who have bred by the way, they are all off by
the
middle of the month.
These birds confine themselves, until after the breeding season, almost exclu-
sively to meadows, frequenting both the wet and the dry. Such haunts as these
and their insectivorous habits place them among our most valuable birds.
The
occasional and brief visits which these birds make to grain-fields, in August,
result in so trifling an injury that it should be entirely overlooked in
view of the
great service they render in the meadows.
It is greatly to the loss of the Northern States that so many of these birds
are
destroyed in the South, where their destruction to the rice crop is very
great.
But before we can consistently ask our Southern friends to stay this destruction,
we must know more definitely than we do now what injury and what service
the Bobolink renders to them, and what its economy is farther south where
it
spends the winter; we must know, too, what proportion of those which are
per-
mitted to come back may be induced to breed with us in preference to passing
on to the north of the United States.
Dr. Brewer states that more recently it has been ascertained that these birds
feed greedily upon the larval of the destructive cotton-worm, and that in
so
doing render an immense service to the cultivators of Sea Island cotton.
What
has been said in the Introduction in regard to the army-worm should be called
to mind in this connection.
Food: Of thirteen specimens examined, one had eaten caterpillars; three
others, larvae, probably caterpillars; three, seven beetles, among them two
lamellicorns and one elater; three, six dipterous insects, among them four
Mu-
cidae; four, seven grasshoppers; one, a cricket; one, ten grasshoppers' eggs;
one,


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