Order the oils and powders, and clean up the spray guns! But don’t overlook using nesting boxes, plantings, food and water to enlist birds in your Spring and Summer campaign against the insects. Imagine a garden bereft of birds! How We Treat Orchids In Summer ? Related Topics Medical News ยป Spring and Summer Allergies [...]
It should be understood that feeding birds is not restricted to Winter. The opulent-garbed rose-breasted grosbeak, who has actually saved a potato crop by feeding potato bugs to its young, will come daily for sunflower seed. So, too, will the purple finch and chickadee. The catbird will stuff himself with mixed suet and seed, then [...]
Birds which will nest in such plantings include the song sparrow, 25 percent of whose diet consists of various insects. Another is the chipping sparrow who wars unceasingly on gypsy moth caterpillars, army worms, cabbage worms, beet worms and plant lice. The catbird, though he does eat fruit, also aids in the control of insects. [...]
The chickadee, a popular year-round resident, has an economic value wholly out of proportion to its diminutive size. This is partly because it canvasses 10 potential insect sites to the larger bird’s one. The black-capped chickadee feeds on moths, tent caterpillars, weevils, the plum curculio and the cotton boll weevil, as well as beetles, ants, [...]
The house wren is a small, brown, endlessly curious and persistently voluble bird, with sharp eyes and slender pointed bill, who peers into each nook and cranny of sheds and wood or brush piles for any imprudent insect. These include mainly grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, bugs and spiders, though he does not disdain cutworms, weevils, ticks [...]
The tree swallow, master of aerial ballet, -yields first place only to the barn swallow in point of usefulness. The diet of the tree swallow consists entirely of insects, mostly caught while in flight. Important in this regard is the fact that these are destroyed while in the adult flying stage before they have laid [...]
The bluebird, whose faint warble first attracts the ear, and then the eye to its lovely cobalt and rust, is easily second in Spring favor. He earns the gardener’s affection by consuming, as 68 per cent of his diet, grasshoppers. beetles, and caterpillars. A nesting box for his use should meet these specifications: floor cavity [...]
The bluebird, whose faint warble first attracts the ear, and then the eye to its lovely cobalt and rust, is easily second in Spring favor. He earns the gardener’s affection by consuming, as 68 per cent of his diet, grasshoppers. beetles, and caterpillars. A nesting box for his use should meet these specifications: floor cavity [...]
Many of the most beneficial birds, fortunately, are very domestic in their choice of nesting sites. So, with a little thought, labor, and expense, their efforts can be utilized in the gardener’s perpetual fight against insect damage. The robin, for one, aside from his customary role of Spring prophet, consumes much wild fruit, hut also [...]
It has been established by the U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey that adult birds have an astonishing capacity to hold food. Not only do they eat until their stomachs are full, but continue until their crops are crammed! Often the contents from a bird’s stomach fill a space three times larger than the capacity [...]