196 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 



EMBERIZA CITRINELLA, Linnaeus. 



YELLOW BUNTING. 



But for the timely suppression of tlie use of poisoned 

 wheat as an indiscriminate and wholesale bird destroyer, 

 the term common, as applied to this and other allied 

 species, would soon have become as inapphcable to them 

 as it is at the present time to the buzzard or kite. 

 No birds more readily than yellow hammers take the 

 poisoned bait, when driven by stress of weather to the 

 farmers' stack-yards, and yet how much have they con- 

 tributed during the spring and summer to preserve 

 those crops, of which they are denied a share.* Besides 



* The following extract from a note appended to St. John's 

 "Natural History and Sport in Moray" (p. 19), is but one of the 

 many evidences published of late in deprecation of the system 

 above referred to : — " It is calculated, and apparently on very good 

 authority, that a pair of sparrows, during the season they are 

 feeding their young ones, kill, in the course of a week, about 

 3,400 caterpillars. Yet farmers and gardeners are so ignorant of 

 their true interests, that they annually destroy hundreds and 

 thousands of these feathered guardians of their crops. One 

 Sussex sparrow club alone, last year (1863) destroyed no less than 

 7,261 of those birds, and a prize was awarded to the most whole- 

 sale murderer. In various parts of England, also, there is a 

 stuff used called " sparrow and vermin killer," by which large 

 numbers of our most useful birds are poisoned. One writer 

 mentions that a man, whose trade it is to kill small birds, showed 

 him with pride about "2000 sparrows, 700 yellow buntings, 600 

 common buntings, innumerable goldfinches, and linnets by the 

 hundred." * * * Almost coincident with this virulent attack 

 upon the feathered songsters of our woods and hedgerows, there 

 has been an increase in the insectivorous enemies of the garden and 

 the farm, and during the past two years especially (in Scotland), 

 whole fields have been devastated by the grub — a foe against which 

 the farmer is next to powerless without his tiny winged allies." 



