ats, 2.9; wheat, 4.8;
other grain, 1.6; fruits, 5; weed seeds and mast 18.2! This report was
based on the examination (by the Biological Survey) of 2,346 stomachs,
and "the charge that the blackbird is an habitual robber of birds' nests
was disproved by the examinations." (F.E.L. Beal.)

FLYCATCHERS.--The high-water mark in insect-destruction by our birds is
reached by the flycatchers,--dull-colored, modest-mannered little
creatures that do their work so quietly you hardly notice them. All you
see in your tree-tops is a two-foot flit or glide, now here and now
there, as the leaves and high branches are combed of their insect life.

Bulletin No. 44 of the Department of Agriculture gives the residuum of
an exhausting examination of 3,398 warbler stomachs, from seventeen
species of birds, and the result is: 94.99 per cent of insect
food,--mostly bad insects, too,--and 5.01 per cent vegetable food. What
more can any forester ask of a bird?

[Illustration: THE ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK
"The Potato-bug Bird," Greatest Enemy of the Potato Beetles
From the "American Natural History"]

THE SPARROWS.--All our sparrows are great consumers of weed seeds.
Professor Beal has calculated the total quantity consumed in Iowa in one
year,--in the days when sparrows were normally numerous,--at 1,750,000
pounds.

THE AMERICAN GOLDFINCH as a weed destroyer has few equals. It makes a
specialty of the seeds of the members of the Order Compositae, and is
especially fond of the seeds of ragweed, thistles, wild lettuce and wild
sunflower. But, small and beautiful as this bird is, there are hundreds
of thousands of grown men in America who would shoot it and eat it if
they dared!

THE HAWKS AND OWLS.--Let no other state repeat the error that once was
made in Pennsylvania when that state enacted in 1885, her now famous
hawk-and-owl bounty law. In order to accomplish the wholesale
destruction of her birds of prey, a law was passed providing for the
payment of a bounty of fifty cents each for the scalps of hawks and
owls. Immediately the slaughter began. In two years 180,000 scalps were
brought in, and $90,000 were paid out for them. It was estimated that
the saving to the farmers in poultry amounted to one dollar for each
$1,205 paid out in bounties.

The awakening came even more swiftly than the ornithologists expected.
By the end of two years from the passage of "the hawk law," the farmers
found their fields and orchards thoroughly overrun b