Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 March 1898 — Birds as Insecticides. [ARTICLE]

Birds as Insecticides.

Birds are nature’s great check on the excess of insects, and keep the balance between plants and insect life. Ten thousand caterpillars, it has been estimated, could destroy every blade of grass on an acre of cultivated ground. In thirty days from the time it is hatched, an ox'dinary caterpillar increases 10,000 times in hulk, and the food it lives and gi'ows on is vegetable. The insect population of a single cherry tree infested with aphides was calculated by a prominent entomologist at no less than 12,000,000. The bird population of cultivated country districts lias been estimated from 700 to 1,000 per square mile. This is small compared with the number of insects, yet as each bird consumes hundreds of insects every day, the latter are precented from becoming the scourge they would be but for their feathered enemies.