APPLE-EATING BIRDS.
In a very delightful letter from the head of an Oxford College I am taken to, task for expressing a certain surprise at the voracity of birds for unripe apples. My correspondent has a deal of most precise and particular observation of the activity of tits and other garden birds who make a breach in the apple (especially Cox's and other of the sweeter sorts), and so give an entrance to wasps, flies, ants, and earwigs. He has made much more careful _observation than .I have ; but-I must believe that this dry and sunny year has made my garden birds more aggressive apple-eaters than before. A blackbird is now devouring the fruit of a Siberian crab with such gusto that a whole fruit disappears within a minute or two. However, the experience from anOxford college garden is corroborated with emphasis in a letter that has just arrived from Victoria, Australia : " The blackbirds (acclimatized) scratch up the bulbs of ranunculus and iris (Spanish) till the garden beds and paths look as if fowls had been scratching them all up. The blackbirds are really a pest, and with the starlings (also imported originally) eat a crop of apples in a very short time."
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