habits as some of the foregoing, frequently leave their haunts and
make excursions into the surrounding country where in summer they feed
upon locusts, beetles, and other injurious insects. They also partake
of considerable quantities of vegetable food, as grains, weed seeds,
grasses, and other herbage. While not included among the insectivorous
forms these birds do much towards diminishing the ever increasing
horde of creeping and jumping things. Ducks and geese on the other
hand are largely utilized by us as food: while their feathers make
comfortable pillows and coverlets.

The Herons, Cranes, and Rails are frequenters of marshes and the
margins of streams and bodies of water, where they assist in keeping
the various forms among the animal life balanced. Fishes, frogs,
snails, insects, and crustaceans are alike devoured by them.

The Snipe, Sandpipers, Plovers, Phalaropes, Curlews, etc., are great
destroyers of insects. Moving as many of them do in great flocks and
spreading out over the meadows, pastures, and hillsides, as well as
among the cultivated fields, they do a large amount of careful police
service in arresting the culprits among insects. They even pry them
out of burrows and crevices in the earth where these creatures lurk
during daytime only to come forth after nightfall to destroy
vegetation. The large flocks of Eskimo Curlews that formerly passed
through eastern Nebraska did magnificent work during years when the
Rocky Mountain Locust was with us, as did also the equally large
flocks of Golden Plovers. The Bartramian Sandpiper even now is a great
factor each summer in checking the increasing locusts on our prairies.

The various members of the Grouse family, while belonging to a
grain-eating group, are certainly quite prominent as insect