SMALL BIRDS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3037, 6 November 1908, Page 4

SMALL BIRDS.

Germany, the United States and Hungary are all actively engaged at present in an investigation concerning the utility of common birds. Hungarian evidence, for example, favours the rook as a bird useful to farmers so long as it is not present in excessive numbers. Generally speaking, the inquiry is more favourable to small birds than most of us would have expected. From an article in the "Mail" (London) however, it appears that a country may have too much of a good thing, even of birds. "Carrion crows, nowhsre so frequent as near London, carry olf the farmer's chickens," it says. "Kent or Worcestershire gardeners have given a'heavy toll of plums to tits and bullfinches, and that rapidly multiplying bird the hawfinch. The sparrows of course anticipate the threshing machine, and levy a heavy toil on the ripe corn. Starlings swaon in the shrubberies and plantations, descending on the garden in the spring and on the orchards in late summer. Larks have spoilt many an autumn-sown crop. Blackbirds and thrushes thieve all fruit, big and small. The goldfinch and the seagull are absolved."