BIRDS AS THE FRIENDS OF PLANTS
The yellow-billed cuckoo eats hundreds of tent caterpillars in a day.
One robin has been known to feed his family five yards of worms a day.
Little humming-birds lick plant lice off foliage with lightning speed.
A chickadee will dispose of 5,500 eggs of the canker-worm moth in one day.
A flicker eats no less than 9,000 ants a day.
A pair of wrens have been seen to carry one hundred insects to their young in an hour. They are especially fond of plant-lice and cutworms.
__________
Seed-eating birds destroy ‘millions of seeds of troublesome weeds — actually eating hundreds of tons of seeds.
“Scientists have examined the contents of the stomachs of the birds, and have learned what food each kind of bird uses. There was a time when people imagined that robins stole so many cherries and berries that it was a good deed to kill them. Now they have found that they destroy so many injurious insects that they do not begrudge them a few cherries. Besides, if mulberry trees are planted nearby they will prefer their fruit to the cherries.”
source - Young American Reader -published 1918
