BIRDS IN WINTER TIME

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 132, 5 June 1937, Page 8

BIRDS IN WINTER TIME

{To the Editor.)

Sir,—May I ask a short space in your paper to remind bird-lovers that natural food is. becoming very scarce and the native birds particularly- are showing every sign of hunger. Many of'the berried trees seem to have failed this year. One owner whose place is encircled with hawthorne trees, usually red with berries, told me that they hardly showed a berry this year. Tuis have, for the first time for many years, come close to suburban houses, and are ■ greedily stripping the ngaio trees in my garden of berries, indicating that some favourite honey flower or berry has failed them back in the bush. If readers have not a proper bird table, a cheap tin tray with turned-up edges, painted well all over to resist rust and hung in a tree by wires through holes made in each corner, will make :an excellent table for bits of cake, bread, fruit, etc., etc. Mine hangs in an Australian ngaio, the branches of which are too upright and thin for puss to climb—yet the tray is within my reach of reprovision. I have in the same tree a string of lumps of hard suet (I thread them with string and a darning needle) suspended over the tray, so that pieces thai fall may hit the tray and not the ground, where unfortunately puss often watches for hungry unaware I little birds. Also I have several coconut shells hung by three wires and holding old cut-down honey cartons filled with the ends of pots of jam, honey, or syrup. The tree is alive with hundreds of native birds as long as a vestige of food is left, and if there is none the plaintive cries of the wax-eyes are most insistent. It will be August or September before new shoots and insects are available for bird food, and one hopes that humans will not fail their little bird friends in the interim.—l am, etc., BIRD LOVER.