FARMING.

Patea Mail, Volume III, Issue 307, 27 March 1878, Page 4

FARMING.

correspondent -writes: At tHis time of the year, when ■ the harvest is being gathered, the sparrow and small bird question is always cropping up, bitter complaints- against them being rife on all sides, the reason being apparently that the farmers here leave their fields and gardens to take care of themselves instead of scaring away the birds as in the Old Country, where they exist in billions of millions, and where, after centuries upon centuries of experience, they say that agriculture cannot be successfully carried on without small birds, and where there is an Act of Parliament protecting the majority of them during the breeding season. In Egypt—the granary of tho world—birds of all kinds exist in countless myriads, and excepting the Polar regions, there is hardly a place in the wide world where the sparrow is not, and (at all events in the Northern Hemisphere) lias not been, long before the time of the Tha roahs, or from the very earliest records. If compulsory education is really carried out here, farmers’ children should be exempt from attendance at school during the seed time and harvest, when by scaring away the birds in the open air from daylight to dark, they could lay in a stock of ruddy health which would in a great measure counteract the ill effects of the crowded schoolroom at other times, America, as well as the old European countries, is affected with many insect scourges just now, but nothing is heard about the ravages of birds, because to drive them away at seed time and harvest is merely a matter of £, s. d:, so many boys at £ o mnch a-week, but all the boys in the world could not frighten away the insects which commit their depredations by night as well as day, and cannot fey any known moans be driven, or exterminated.—Auckland Herald.