MAOPIES & OTHER BIRDS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 October 1941, Page 2

MAOPIES & OTHER BIRDS

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —I see 'by the paper reports that the Acclimatisation Society is still wanting to reduce the number of magpies, and wants to lift the protection during the shooting season. The magpie is a very quiet bird. If the protection were lifted even for a week, there would not be many left. I suppose they would buy the feet or head and pay a big price for them. I do not know, and I do not think they know either, why they have such a set on magpies. I suppose they say they kill sparrows and yellow hammers, which are perhaps our two worst birds, and which I suppose cost the Dominion hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. Last year, when I went to town, I passed a 25 acre paddock of wheat, and there were about 400 to ,500 sparrows in one corner. The birds would start eating the grain about 2 weeks before it was cut, and it was cut for about 3 weeks before it was threshed. The birds must have eaten nearly 5 bushels of the wheat to the acre. They would also pull up ,| to 1 a bushel when the wheat was sown, which would be an extra cost. I suppose sparrows are one of the society’s pet birds, whose nests the magpie is supposed to rob. If the Japanese came to New Zealand, the townspeople would be the first to suffer from a bread shortage. Sparrows do very little good on a farm. They eat the grub of the diamond back moth and perhaps the while butterfly grub, but I am sure they do a hundred times more harm than good. They eat a lot of fowl wheat in a year, besides doing harm to gardens. The blackbird and thrush do, I suppose, nearly half as much damage and no good. New Zealand would be a great fruit country without these birds. Some years ago I had a big crop of laurel berries. The birds (blackbirds and thrush-, es) will not eat other fruit if they can get laurel berries, and I would; recommend all fruit growers to have a fair lot of these trees. When the berries were getting short, 1 collected a lot, cut off the end and split them down, pushed out the stone and I put rat-nip or strychnine on the berries and some milk cream. I only had one blackbird left as far as I could see after that. I left my apples on the trees until June. I had a splendid crop. The whiteeyes commenced to eat them then. There must be thousands and thousands of pounds spent in providing cov-ered-in places for fruit trees, so that blackbirds and thrushes cannot get at the fruit. This must make the fruit much dearer. I look upon the magpie as perhaps the best, or at any rate the second-best farmer’s bird, and I think townspeople should use their brains in their own business. The farmers can manage theirs. —I am, etc., WM. RAYNER. The Cliffs, Masterton, October IG.