destroyers. Throughout the fall and
winter they spend the time destroying weed seeds. In summer they eat
Colorado potato beetles, chinch-bugs, cotton boll-weevils,
squash-beetles, grasshoppers and cutworms. The mother quail, with her
family of twelve to twenty little ones, patrols the fields thoroughly
for insects. Quails should be prized as among a farmer's most valuable
helpers and protected at all seasons.

Similar in the good work it does is the meadow-lark. Grasshoppers,
caterpillars and cutworms form a large part of its diet, and its
vegetable food consists of weed seeds or waste grain.

King-birds are useful in protecting poultry and song birds from hawks,
and are also great fly catchers, taking many beetles on the wing.

Doves eat great quantities of seeds of harmful weeds. They also eat some
grain, but almost altogether after the crop has been gathered. Old
damaged corn and single grains scattered along the roads are eaten, but
there is no complaint of doves doing injury to fields of growing grain.

The orioles are beautiful, are sweet singers, and no exception can be
taken to their food habits. Caterpillars are their principal article of
food, but plant-and bark-lice, spiders and other insects are also eaten.
Orioles do not eat much vegetable food. They have been accused of eating
peas and grapes, but there seems no evidence to show that this habit is
general.

The food habits of cuckoos render them very desirable, since they eat
hairy caterpillars, particularly tent-caterpillars, for which they seem
to have an especial fondness, fall web-worms and locusts, besides other
injurious insects, but they are accused of bad habits in relation to
other birds, and can therefore hardly be classed among the wholly useful
birds. Warblers and vireos are among the most helpful birds in an
orchard, devouring large quantities of insects.

There is no class of birds concerning which it is more necessary that
the farmer should be well informed, than the hawks and owls, since some
of them are wholly good, and of the greatest possible benefit to him and
the fruit grower, while others are extremely harmful in their food
habits.

The harmful varieties live almost entirely on poultry and wild birds,
and include the goshawk or partridge hawk and the Cooper hawk, which is
a true chicken-hawk and should be recognized by all farmers at sight.

The goshawk and chicken-hawk, in the amount of damage done, far exceed
all other bird