Page:Handbook for Boys.djvu/114

Let us be thankful that there has now arisen a new class of boys, the scouts, who, like the knights of old, are champions of the defenceless, even the birds. Scouts are the birds' police, and woe betide the lad who is caught with a nest and eggs, or the

limp corpse of some feathered songster that he has slaughtered. Scouts know that there is no value in birds that are shot, except a few scientific specimens collected by trained museum experts. Scouts will not commend a farmer for shooting a hawk or an owl as a harmful bird, even though it were see to capture a young chicken. They will post themselves on the subject and find that most hawks and owls feed chiefly on field mice and large insects injurious. to the farmer's crops, and that thus, in spite of an occasional toll on the poultry, they are as a whole of tremendous value. The way the birds help mankind is little short of a marvel. A band of nuthatches worked all winter in a pear orchard near Rochester and rid the trees of a certain insect that had entirely destroyed the crop of the previous summer. A pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks were seen to feed their nest of youngsters four hundred and twenty-six times in a day, each time with a billful of potato-bugs or other insects. A professor in Washington counted two hundred and fifty tent caterpillars in the stomach of a dead yellow-billed cuckoo, and, Bluebird at entrance of nesting-box what appeals to us even more, five hundred bloodthirsty mosquitoes inside of one night-hawk.

It must not be forgotten that large dry parks are among the best places for observing birds. As an example of what can be accomplished, even with limited opportunities, there was a boy who happened to know where some owls roosted.