y thinks that just because a bird is alive and moves it is a
proper target for his air rifle or his sling shot. {93} Let us be
thankful that there has now arisen a new class of boys, the scouts,
who, like the knights of old, are champions of the defenceless, even
the birds. Scouts are the birds' police, and wo betide the lad who is
caught with a nest and eggs, or the limp corpse of some feathered
songster that he has slaughtered. Scouts know that there is no value
in birds that are shot, except a few scientific specimens collected by
trained museum experts. Scouts will not commend a farmer for shooting
a hawk or an owl as a harmful bird, even though it were seen to
capture a young chicken. They will post themselves on the subject and
find that most hawks and owls feed chiefly on field mice and large
insects injurious to the farmer's crops, and that thus, in spite of an
occasional toll on the poultry, they are as a whole of tremendous
value. The way the birds help mankind is little short of a marvel. A
band of nuthatches worked all winter in a pear orchard near Rochester
and rid the trees of a certain insect that had entirely destroyed the
crop of the previous summer. A pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks were
seen to feed their nest of youngsters four hundred and twenty-six
times in a day, each time with a billful of potato-bugs or other
insects. A professor in Washington counted two hundred and fifty tent
caterpillars in the stomach of a dead yellow-billed cuckoo, and, what
appeals to us even more, five hundred bloodthirsty mosquitoes inside
of one night-hawk.

[Illustration: White-breasted nuthatch]

[Illustration: Bluebird at entrance of nesting-box]

It must not be forgotten that large city parks are among the best
places for observing birds. As an example of what can be accomplished,
even with limited opportunities, there was a boy who happened to know
where some owls roosted. {94} Now all owls swallow their prey whole,
and in digesting this food they disgorge the skulls, bones, fur, and
feathers in the form of hard dry pellets. This boy used to go out on
Saturday or Sunday afternoon and bring home his pockets full of
pellets, and then in the evening he would break them apart. In this
way he learned exactly what the owls had been eating (without killing
them) and he even discovered the skulls of certain field mice that
naturalists had never known existed in that region. He let the owl be
his collector.

Pa