he United States is worth twenty dollars in cash. Each
nuthatch, creeper and chickadee is worth from five to ten dollars,
according to local circumstances. You might just as well cut down four
twenty-inch trees and let them lie and decay, as to permit one
woodpecker to be killed and eaten by an Italian in the North, or a negro
in the South. The downy woodpecker is the relentless enemy of the
codling moth, an insect that annually inflicts upon our apple crop
damages estimated by the experts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
at twelve million dollars!

Now, is a federal strong-arm migratory bird law needed for such birds or
not? Let the owners of orchards and forests make answer.

THE CASE OF THE CODLING MOTH AND CURCULIO.--The codling moth and
curculio are twin terrors to apple-growers, partly because of their
deadly destructiveness, and partly because man is so weak in resisting
them. The annual cost of the fight made against them, in sprays and
labor and apparatus, has been estimated at $8,250,000. And what do the
birds do to the codling moth,--when there are any birds left alive to
operate? The testimony comes from all over the United States, and it is
worth while to cite it briefly as a fair sample of the work of the birds
upon this particularly deadly pest. These facts and quotations are from
the "Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture," for 1911.

[Illustration: DOWNY WOODPECKER]

_The Downy Woodpecker_ is the champion tree-protector, and also one of
the greatest enemies of the codling moth. When man is quite unable to
find the hidden larvae, Downy locates it every time, and digs it out. It
extracts worms from young apples so skillfully that often the fruit is
not permanently injured. Mr. F.M. Webster reports that the labors of
this bird "afford actual and immediate relief to the infected fruit."
Testimony in favor of the downy woodpecker has come from New York, New
Jersey, Texas and California, "and no fewer than twenty larvae have been
taken from a single stomach."

Take the _Red-Shafted Flicker_ vs. the codling moth. Mr. A.P. Martin of
Petaluma, Cal., states that during the early spring months (of 1890)
they were seen by hundreds in his orchard, industriously examining the
trunks and larger limbs of the fruit trees; and he also found great
numbers of them around sheds where he stored his winter apples and
pears. As the result of several hours' search, Mr. Martin found only one
worm, and this one esca