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Canker-worms of one or of several species often strip them of their leaves; the tent-caterpillars pitch their tents among the branches and carry on their dangerous depredations; the slug-worms, the offspring of a fly called Selandria cerasi, reduce the leaves to skeletons, and thus destroy them; the cherry-weevils penetrate their bark, cover their branches with warts and cause them to decay; and borers gnaw galleries in their trunks and devour the inner bark and sap-wood. So you see that, with such an army of destroyers, we may be thankful to get any fruit at all."
"Let us go over to the brush hedge where the bird seemed to be. Hush! there he sits upon the limb of a maple. No look a little higher up. He is perfectly still, and acts as if he was half asleep. See what a powerful bill he has! With that he tears away the ugly webs of tent-caterpillars from the fruit trees, and sometimes eats more than forty caterpillars without stopping he is so fond of them.
The seventeen species of titmice which inhabit the United States, and many of which remain all winter, are all insect eaters to a great extent, eating large quantities of tent-caterpillars, moths and their eggs, weevils, including the cotton boll-weevil, plum-curculio, ants, spiders, plant-lice, bugs and beetles. They also eat small seeds, particularly those of the poison ivy.
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.
The various leaf worms attack the life of the tree also. The grape-leaf skeletonizer eats every particle of green from the leaves, leaving only the veins. The canker-worms and the destructive tent-caterpillars also cause the death of many fruit trees. Of insects which attack the fruit, the list is long. The codling-moth of the apple causes a greater money loss than any other enemy of fruits.
If they were as domestic and plentiful as robins, they would render us immense service. A colony of jays would soon destroy all the tent-caterpillars on your place, and many other pests. In Indiana they will build in the shrubbery around dwellings, but we usually hear their cries from mountain-sides and distant groves. Pleasant memories of rambles and nutting excursions they always awaken.
"A miller lays the eggs, the summer before, on a branch of the tree, and there they stay till about the first of June; then they hatch out, and build their nest. The nests look something like tents, don't you see they do?" "Yes, so they do," said Oscar. "That's the reason they are called tent-caterpillars. There are three or four hundred of them in every nest.
Now and then he may be seen going about near the ground, silent, and absorbed in his arduous task of teaching those clamorous urchins to get their own living; or in the early morning, engaged in picking open the hideous nests of the tent-caterpillars and quietly taking his breakfast therefrom.
Peter replied that he did and that he had seen a great many nests just like it, and had noticed how the caterpillars ate all the leaves near them. "I'll venture to say that you won't see very many leaves eaten around that nest," replied Kitty. "Those are called tent-caterpillars, and they do an awful lot of damage.
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