File:Annual report (1901) (14747027761).jpg

Identifier: annualreport891901021newy (find matches)
Title: Annual report
Year: 1902 (1900s)
Authors: New York (State). Forest, Fish and Game Commission
Subjects: Forests and forestry Fisheries Game and game-birds
Publisher: (Albany, N.Y. : The Commission)
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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that thirty-four per cent of the food for the months when the bird is on its summer range is composed of these destructive leaf-eating insects. One stomach contained no less than ioo of these creatures. The oriole is not a lover of the forest, but prefers the more open groves, or the borders ofthe dense wood. The insects which it eats, however, are the same as those which feed upon the leaves of forest trees, so that by destroying them the bird reduces the sum total of the species, and so benefits the forest as much, if not so directly,as it would if it ate them upon the forest trees. Several other species of orioles are found within the borders of our country, and all of them show the same fondness for caterpillars for food. The Robin (Morula migrator id). The common robin can scarcely be called a forest bird, though instances have been known where it has nested in the depths of the woodland, and it was observedby the writer in the backwoods of Maine, far from farms or any extensive cleared
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SOLITARY VIREO BIRDS AS CONSERVATORS OF THE FOREST. 263 lands. The diet of the bird, however, merits some consideration in treating of the good work done by birds in destroying forest enemies. The robin eats a large number of injurious insects, but the ones to which attention is particularly called now are the leaf-destroying caterpillars. These constitute over eight per cent of the robins yearly food, as determined by the examination of 330 of their stomachs. They are a very constant element of the diet, and even the birds taken during the winter months had in some way found quite a number of them, probably from crannies where they were hibernating. In the summer of 1898, when the forest tent caterpillar overran the maplewoods of Vermont, and thereby did much injury to the sugar orchards, thousands of acres were stripped nearly bare of foliage. The insects were of course preyed upon by many birds, but the good work done by one pair of robins deserves to beplaced on record. This pair had built

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