"THE WAGES OF THE CHOIR."
TENNYSON, who loved blackbirds and thrushes, and kept "smooth plats of fruitful ground" for them to eat and live in, must have had lamentable collisions with his gardener :—
"The espaliers and the standards all Are thine; the range of lawn and park : The unnetted black-hearts ripen dark, All thine, against the garden wall."
"All thine,"—the gardener could hardly be expected to reflect on the phrase with composure. Perhaps be was a man of wide sympathies, who would not have objected to allowing the blackbird one or two cherries here and there, but to be asked to hand over the entire produce of the kitchen-garden without lifting a finger! It was really a very unhappy predicament for a gardener to be in. Possibly he had even pruned the trees. In like evil case, the gardener of a friend of the writer the other day spoke darkly of the future. The birds bad not treated him fairly. He had not netted the trees ; he had not fired a shot in anger; he rather liked the birds,—liked to see them about, and hear them sing, and all that. And then for them to take every cherry on the tree ;
not simply a few, which they could have bad and no one minded, but the whole crop before it was ripe. He would
have to buy a gun if this sort of thing was to continue. It could not be allowed to go on, and must be put a stop to. There must be moderation and give-and-take in the case of birds as of men.
There is at least one bird which gardeners might be per- mitted to treat with severity, aud it is, of course, the sparrow. There is really nothing to be said for him. He does, it is true, eat a good many caterpillars while his nestlings are young, but he soon changes from caterpillars to a grain diet, and his ravages in the cornfields, when he is out harvesting with a few thousand friends from town, are almost incalculable. He also bites crocuses for the fun of seeing the head come off the stalk, and primroses when they are in bud, just to prevent the things flowering; and he chews the buds of gooseberries and currants, and actually selects, among his small supply of insect food, the ladybird, which eats the aphis and is the hop- grower's best friend. He even drives away delightful birds like martins and swallows, and takes their nests, and he has the presumption to bring up three families in a year on the premises of human beings. Such a bird is without shame. He remains shameless, and chirps cheerfully through the hottest weather ; be cannot sing. Perhaps if he could sing he might be forgiven a little, like his relations. His relations, although they do some harm, do also some good, and make up for their misdeeds either by singing charmingly or by looking handsome. The chaffinch, who is rather fond of corn and fruit- buds, eats large quantities of caterpillars, wears the brightest colours, builds the prettiest possible nest, and has a fascinating little rill of a song, which he sings over and over again with the utmost confidence. The greenfinch, whom the hop-grewers cannot bear, for he pulls the hops to pieces looking for the seeds, can be an attractive bird, with his bold green breast and the yellow on his wings. He, too, eats a good many cater- pillars, and in that respect is a better bird than his cousin the bullfinch. The bullfinch, unhappily, is a horribly destructive bird. He will go over a cherry-tree in bud, and chop the buds into tatters ; he will bite straight into the middle of the fattest and most promising pear-buds ; and though he eats a fair amount of weed-seed, like thistles and docks, be is a confirmed vegetarian, and does not care for insects at all. He likes his green food absolutely as fresh and young as possible ; and if in winter you throw him hemp, which most birds think a delicacy, be will pass by the hemp if he can only find among the fallen leaves the cotyledons of the sycamore. These carry the greenest and juiciest morsels of immature tree-seedlings, and suit the bullfinch very well indeed. But the bullfinch is not likely to become extinct just yet, even though he gets short shrift from the market-gardener. He gives nobody much chance to hurt him in the summer, when he lives in the woods. In winter, when he is shot, he is almost handsomer than at any other time, perhaps because of the contrast of his bright pink breast and the white bar above his tail flashing by flowerless beds and leafless boughs.
In an interesting paper which Mr. Cecil Hooper, of the Wye Agricultural College, contributes to the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, he has collected a number of opinions from practical fruit-growers and market-gardeners as to the value of various birds in the garden and on cultivated land. Not many birds are labelled as destructive, or as doing more harm than good, and some of them, as it would be expected they should, come in for high praise. "No farmer and few gardeners," it seems, will say much against the robin, which is not surprising. Devotion to the robin marks the true countryman. The present writer knew an old gardener who once, cutting at some long grass, killed a robin on its nest; he wept, and went home for the day. Other birds have earned excellent characters. The hedge-sparrow, cousin of the robin, is "all good and no harm "; the pied wagtail is "good in every way "; the wren, although so small, has been seen to feed its young with insects two hundred and seventy-eight times in a day ; the flycatcher does even better, for a pair of them were observed to begin feeding their young at 3.35 a.m., and to end at 8.50 p.m., bringing in that time five hundred and thirty- seven meals, all of insects. The cuckoo has been watched and seen to average a caterpillar every five minutes, and the cuckoo's mate, the wryneck, is an assiduous eater of ants and woodlice ; the nightingale is "entirely beneficial," and even if he were not it would not matter. But the main difficulty is with the small band of fruit-eaters. You may net a tree or two, but you cannot net acres of fruit-trees, and the question of "the wages of the choir" becomes really serious. Most of the fruit-eaters are singing-birds, and if the lark (who sometimes does damage to springing corn) and the nightingale are excepted, the first five are perhaps the finest singers of all. If the blackbird, thrush, missel- thrush, blackcap, and garden warbler were taken away, there would be very little garden song left ; and they in their turn, if nobody interfered with them, would leave very little garden fruit. The starling, one of the most voracious of devourers of cherries, is more a whistler or a talker than a singer, but he cannot be spared from the chimney-pots any more than the blackbird from the lilac. The starling, among other problems which he sets for solution, has not only increased his numbers enormously of late years, for no apparent reason, but has changed his habits. He used to be an insect-eater, and a mere amateur of fruit-tasting. Now he strips the orchard, and is on all the gardeners' and farmers' black lists. He does some good in eating grubs and daddy-long-legs and so on, but that is when he cannot get cherries.
Gardeners have their own methods of scaring birds from
seeds and fruit. One of the most remarkable engines which the writer remembers, and which doubtless survives in many places, was a piece of slate, hung by a string to a bent stick. On one side the gardener drew a terrific cat, or, rather, a head like the Cheshire Cat's; it had frightful teeth and whiskers done in white paint, and the idea was that the sparrow or whatever it was would come along and think it was only an old slate, and then the slate would turn round and the bird would see it was an awful cat and would fly away in a paroxysm of fear. A more successful custodian in the same garden, which was walled in, was a pinioned sparrow. hawk, which lived near the strawberry beds and was fed occasionally with raw meat. It would have died otherwise, for it never caught anything. A similar experiment which has been tried and failed is the tethered cat ; and a pioneer in such work has suggested that the cat might be fastened by a ring and a cord to a running line. But the real remedies mean much harder work than that. Seeds can be protected fairly easily; paraffin and red:lead for peas, soot over seeds and buds, and black cotton will do most of what is wanted. Water provided in hot weather will keep many birds, though not all, from the plum-trees. But the large orchards need more. The patrol of the clappers, or the bell, or the gun, or the discharge of the automatic scare-gun will do what cannot be done in any other way. The fruit-growers and market- gardeners make up their minds to the troublesome necessity of perpetual scaring. The luckier persons are those who can watch with equanimity the disappearance of a crop of cherries, and think themselves well paid by the wild piping and the indolent madrigals of the choir.
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