COUNTRY LIFE
Winter Bravery The rigours of the frost have quite overcome the timidities of some of the larger birds, especially rooks and gulls. Gulls
assemble, for example, daily in the porch of a small Norfolk house ; and enjoy a first breakfast. It is useless to attempt to feed the smaller birds till the gulls depart. They will on occasion attack and even kill any smaller bird that comes too near. Even wild wood pigeons are more than usually tame—. and destructive—and half the farmers in England have built rough " hides " as bases of attack. Immense numbers have been shot under advice from agricultural authority. Such things must be ; but it is vastly more important, on purely utilitarian grounds, to preserve birds than to shoot them. Even the starlings, which offended farmers before the frost came, do inestimable service in destroying that worst of insect plagues, the ubiquitous wire-worm, which may enjoy as much as five years of underground destructive life before it turns into a more visible beetle.
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