This section is from "The Horticulturist, And Journal Of Rural Art And Rural Taste", by P. Barry, A. J. Downing, J. Jay Smith, Peter B. Mead, F. W. Woodward, Henry T. Williams. Also available from Amazon: Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste.
I once noticed a proposition to stock your city with Birds, in order to rid you of the worms. Some one, I think, recommended a large importation of sparrows. Few people have either the inclination or time to study insects, but such ignorance of birds is amazing. If you had thousands of Canary birds upon your trees during the season of the worms, and they could get no other food, they would soon die; and the sparrows are of the same class, their beaks are short, sharp and strong, formed for cutting off the busks of seeds, and seeds are their chief food. To be sure, they will feed their young on softer food, and will take some insects; but the sparrows would never conquer your span-worms.
Much the largest portion of all the birds are insectiverous; nearly all the singing birds of summer; and they attend to the caterpillar business for us in the country; but there are difficulties in the way of having their services in a city like this. Brooklyn has grown faster than the trees. Had you some large old parks, with lofty elms or willows, the Baltimore Oriole would be a common bird; she does not object to city life, provided she has the proper trees. It is one of our most common birds in Newark, N. J. This season I noticed they were plenty in the Washington Parade Ground in New York; there, also, I noticed several kinds of the thirty or forty varieties of little warblers, and these are among the best of the insectiverous birds. Had you large gardens with thick hedge-rows, and not too many cats, you would have the cat-bird, possibly the thrush might come. Had you old apple orchards with hollow limbs, the blue-birds would be here, and all these would enjoy your worms hugely.
Your city might swarm with pigeons, but they would not touch your insects; they do not even feed their young upon them, as quails and poultry do. All the varieties of swallows, including the martins, (and some of these can be domesticated,) are fly-catchers, and might prove more injurious than useful. The kingbird, pewit, snap up immense numbers of flies, and some bugs and bees in the ' day-time; but the butterfly of your span-worm is a moth, and is on the wing almost exclusively at night The night fly-catchers, as the whip-poor-will and night-hawks have their peculiar habits, and seldom pursue their food in cities.
The wren you can have. It is easily domesticated, and increases rapidly; bat except while the span-worm is still small, or during the few days that the moths are in existence, it can not accomplish much; its capacity is too small, and I suspect its taste is too delicate for food so gross.
But still I would advise you to put up wren-houses all over the city; independent of its usefulness, it is an amusing little pet. I have watched one this season with unusual interest. When it first came on, it found its house occupied by a pair of blue-birds; but it is a pugnacious little fellow, and soon turned them out; then their nest was carried out also. In a few days the pair entered upon the great work of building their nest, and it is astonishing what a number of little sticks they will carry in before it is finished. Give your wrens good sized houses, and let the doorway be a good large augur-hole, as they are sometimes much annoyed by the labor of turning and twisting the sticks to get them in endways. I had a quantity of brushwood carried into the garden early in the spring, to stick peas with; and you should have seen how the wrens were delighted with it; there they chattered and worked at the twigs for many days.
At first they were annoyed by the cats, but they soon found they were perfectly safe in that brush-heap. Sometimes I have seen a cat make a spring, but it was always unsuccessful; the little bird would hop aside, and as if to express contempt, would cock its little tail up straighter than usual, reminding you of Washington Irving's little dog, so proud that he twisted his tail so tight that he could not keep his hind feet upon the ground.
The subject of the protection and uses of birds is attracting much attention.
As one of the links in the chain of animated nature, we should be careful how we interfere; by destroying birds that seem to be destructive to our crops, we might break the harmony of that chain, and thus give a preponderance to worse enemies.
But it is with birds, as with ourselves and all the rest of animated creation. Life is a question of food. Suppose you had birds enough to destroy, or even hold in check, this worm pest; as a food, it would only last through the month of June and a few days in July, and then where would this great army of birds, now increased by their broods having come to maturity, be fed during the remainder of the summer. Remember they are insectiverous, and could not be subsisted upon grain.
Birds can only be used as an adjunct, and to a limited extent, in this warfare.
 
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