File:How to attract the birds - and other talks about bird neighbors (1903) (14565270009).jpg

Identifier: howtoattractbird00bla (find matches)
Title: How to attract the birds : and other talks about bird neighbors
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Blanchan, Neltje, 1865-1918
Subjects: Birds Bird attracting
Publisher: New York : Doubleday Page
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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must yield their reluctant bodiesto that merciless barbed tongue. Our little frienddowny and the hairy woodpecker, the most benefi-cial members of the family, the flicker that descendsto the ground to eat ants, the red-headed wood-pecker that intersperses his diet with grasshoppers,even the much-maligned sapsucker that pays for hisintemperate drinks of freshly drawn sap by eatingants, grasshoppers, flies, wasps, bugs, and beetles,—to these common woodpeckers and to their lessneighborly kin, more than to any other agency, weowe the preservation of our timber from hordes ofdestructive insects. But acknowledgment of this deep obligationmust not cause us to overlook the nuthatches, browncreepers, chickadees, kinglets, and such other help-ers that keep up quite as tireless a search for insectson the tree trunks and larger limbs as the moreperfectly equipped woodpeckers. In a single daya chickadee will sometimes eat more than four hun-dred eggs of the apple plant-louse, says Professor 180
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Preservers of timber : Downy Woodpeckers What Birds Do for Us Clarence Moores Weed, while throughout thewinter one will destroy an immense number of theeggs of the canker-worm. CARETAKERS OF THE GROUND FLOOR Hidden in the grasses at the foot of the trees,among the undergrowth of woodland borders, underthe carpet of last years leaves, and buried in theground itself, are insect enemies whose name islegion. Among the worst of them are the whitegrubs—the larvae of May beetles or June bugs—andthe wireworms which attack the roots of grassesand the farmers grain; the maggots of crane-flieswhich do their fatal work under cover of darkness inthe soil; root- and crown-borers which destroy an-nually fields of timothy, clover, and herds-grass;grasshoppers, locusts, chinch bugs, cutworms andarmy worms that have ruined crops enough to paythe national debt many times over. But what a hungry feathered army rushes totheir attack! And how much larger would thatarmy have been if, in our blind stupid

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