Birds digest their food so rapidly, that it is difficult to estimate from the contents of a bird's stomach at a given time how much it eats during the day. The stomach of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, shot at six o'clock in the morning, contained the partially digested remains of forty-three tent caterpillars, but how many it would have eaten before night no one can say.
Mr. E. H. Forbush, Ornithologist of the Board of Agriculture of Massachusetts, states that the stomachs of four Chickadees contained one thousand and twenty-eight eggs of the cankerworm. The stomachs of four other birds of the same species contained about six hundred eggs and one hundred and five female moths of the cankerworm. The average number of eggs found in twenty of these moths was one hundred and eighty-five ; and as it is estimated that a Chickadee may eat thirty female cankerworm moths per day during the twenty-five days which these moths crawl up trees, it follows that in this period each Chickadee would destroy one hundred and thirty-eight thousand seven hundred and fifty eggs of this noxious insect.
Professor Forbes, Director of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History, found one hundred and seventy-five larvae of Bibio—a fiy which in the larval stage feeds on the roots of grass—in the stomach of a single Robin, and the intestine contained probably as many more.
Many additional cases could be cited, showing the intimate relation of birds to insect-life, and emphasizing the necessity of protecting and encouraging these little-appreciated allies of the agriculturist.
The service rendered man by birds in killing the small rodents so destructive to crops is performed by Hawks and Owls—birds the uninformed farmer considers his enemies. The truth is that, with two excep-
