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Updated: June 6, 2025
'You could not, says a friend, 'be out at night in a boat, and hear their continual swish, swish, in the water, without believing it. If so, the habit is a quaint change of nature in them; for they belong, I am assured by my friend Professor Newton, not to the insect-eating, but to the fruit-eating family of bats, who, in the West as in the East Indies, may be seen at night hovering round the Mango-trees, and destroying much more fruit than they eat.
During the summer they turn to a diet composed partly of insects and here again they help the farmer by eating the weevils, leaf-beetles, grasshoppers, bugs and wasps that infest his crops. The various species of swallows rank high as insect-eating birds.
The spring of 1895 was remarkable for a plague of the caterpillars of the winter-moth, due to the destruction of insect-eating birds by the great frost; the caterpillars devoured the young leaves of the plum-trees, so that whole orchards were completely stripped. The balance between insectivorous birds and caterpillar life was destroyed for a time, and the caterpillars conquered the plum-trees.
Many of them had been girdled by the Indians to obtain the sweet inner bark, which is a favorite luxury of the Utes. We see very few birds in these mountains, which are too wild for the warblers and insect-eating birds. We met with the mountain-grouse, a bird of about the size and color of Tetrao cupido, and one or two hawks.
Does he instinctively know what corns, when three or four inches beneath the ground, are thus affected? Not a bit of it. To him, a strictly grain-feeding and not an insect-eating bird, the necessity takes the place of the choice. He is hungry; the means of satisfying his hunger are at hand.
If there is a decaying bough, or, more particularly, one that has been sawn off, it slowly decays into a hollow, and will remain in that state for years, the resort of endless woodlice, snapped up by insect-eating birds. Down from the branches in spring there descend long, slender threads, like gossamer, with a caterpillar at the end of each the insect-eating birds decimate these.
An insect-eating bird is said to require for its support about 250,000 insects a year, and the number of such birds must amount to thousands of millions. As a rule there is a kind of equilibrium between the forces of destruction and of reproduction. If a species is nearly exterminated by its enemies, those enemies lose their food-supply and perish themselves.
It is sad to think of their dying for lack of the food we can so easily afford them, and they will be sure to repay us by their sweet songs and confiding tameness when summer days return. One is apt to think that winter is the only time when birds need our help and bounty, but there is almost as much real distress after a long drought in summer, especially amongst the insect-eating birds.
Resisting the temptation to glance at the marvellous adaptations which we find to-day in our plant world the insect-eating plants, the climbers, the parasites, the sensitive plants, the water-storing plants in dry regions, and so on we must turn to the consideration of the insects themselves. We have already studied the evolution of the insect in general, and seen its earlier forms.
The tendrils of a plant know where the stake or cord is, and they reach out for it and twine themselves around it. Unwind them, and the next day they are found again twined around it. Move the stake or cord, and the tendril moves after it. The insect-eating plants are able to distinguish between nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous food, accepting the one and rejecting the other.
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