It has long been known that birds play an important part in relation to agriculture, but there seems to be a tendency to dwell on the harm they do rather then on the good. Whether a bird is injurious or beneficial depends almost entirely upon what it eats, and in the case of species which are unusually abundant or which depend in part upon the farmer's crops for subsistence the character of the food often becomes a very practical question. If crows or blackbirds are seen in numbers about cornfields, or if woodpeckers are noticed at work in an orchard, it is perhaps not surprising that they are accused of doing harm. Careful investigation, however, often shows that they are actually destroyin…
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