Birds and Noises
The plover is the most beneficial and the least harmful of birds. Its beneficences are unqualified on any farm land. At the other extreme comes the starling in the fruit-orchard. One owner of a fine cherry orchard reckons that his crop costs him two thousand cartridges a year. The starlings are much the worst offenders. A flock will descend on a tree so thickly that a shot will kill half a dozen or more, and when they fall the rest just rise a few feet in the air and drop back again to their disturbed meal. Pigeons are reckoned to come next in greed. A crop containing forty to fifty cherry stones is no rarity, and blackbirds and thrushes come perhaps next in destructiveness. Experiments are being meditated by one most ingenious grower to the end of discovering whether there is any form of noise particularly distasteful to the birds. It may be that some continuous rattle might frighten birds which pay the very smallest attention to a single report from a gun. As for roosting starlings, they can be driven from a plantation by the use of crackers let off several nights in succession. It is strange how little birds mind the gun. Pheasants will stroll undisturbed about a rifle range when firing is active, and young rooks will allow an inexpert marks- man with a rook-rifle a long succession of attacks.
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