Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 January 1918 — Rats Enemies of Birds. [ARTICLE]

Rats Enemies of Birds.

The number of useful insect-eating birds nesting on the ground or in low bushes which fall victims to rats is extremely large and is one of the many kinds of injury done by these pernicious animals which cannot be computed, writes E. W. Nelson in the National Geographic Magazine. Probably few frequenters of the countryside have returned to look into a bird’s nest to observe its condition without many times finding it destroyed and fragments of egg shells lying about. Unquestionably a large percentage of such nests located in the neighborhood of buildings have been raided by rats. On one of the small Danish islands it has been authentically recorded that the progeny of a single pair of rata, which escaped from captivity, in two years’ time exterminated a great colony of birds for which the island had been noted.