KARIOI.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 2615, 16 April 1889, Page 2

KARIOI.

A Plague op Caterpillars.—A correspondent at Karioi writes to a friend in Hamilton as follows:—Do yon remember my showing you some green maize we had growing for the cows when you were down here? Well, there is not a green leaf left in the whole piece ; the caterpillars have swept it all off. They literally swarmed, and birds of all sorts had a great feast I have seen nothing like it for many years. Hence you see what suicidal folly it is to preach an exterminating crusade against the small birds. My gracious! what an awful infliction tho caterpillars were in the olden days, a long timo ago. I remember in Taranaki, in the year '54, they were something awful. They were, in fact, on a mission of devastation, which they carried out to the utmost letter. Whole crops of barley, wheat, potatoes and oats were swept off; in fact, the settlers had to die , ditches across their line of march, into which they fell, and were afterwards destroyed wholesale upon all the roads and paths throughout the district. Wherever fern or herbage of any root grew alongside, they literally swarmed, and it was impossible to net one's foot down without crushing dozens. I went out to the farm of Mi- T. King, beyond the Henui, where the visitation was really worst of all, I cannot really forget it. The whole of the grass upon the farm was being swept clean away by a devouring host. The turkeys, the pigs, and the fowls had a feasting, but they were all sick of it, and had evidently given up in despair. It was a smoking hot day, not a breath of air was stirring and it is really no stretch of imagination to say that you could distinctly hear the work of destruction going on, when one's ear was laid upon the ground. It was a very serious matter to Mr King, he had a fine dairy of milch cosvs, and they had to be hired out, as there was not a blade of grass left to feed them. When I remember those old days and the frightful havoc these wretched insects made in the crops of the earlier settlers, all over the North Island, I feel rather annoyed when I hear some settler who has just lost a little grain or turnips maybe by the small birds, loudly demanding their extermination. Insensate folly! Now I don't go in for leaving the little beggars to increase and multiply at their own sweet will, that would ' never wash,' let them be kept within proper bounds, but depend upon it, the small birds importation, so far from being a curse, will intime be looked upon in the prope r light, and he considered an unmixed blessing.