USE OF SMALL BIRDS. 225 



Before we take leave of this tribe of small birds, we would 

 say a word or two respecting the benefit or injuries imputed to 

 them. That they are occasionally mischievous, cannot be 

 denied : though it is but fair to add, that they also, like the 

 Rooks before mentioned, repay us by a considerable balance 

 of good. That the Bullfinch feeds on the buds and seeds of 

 trees there can be no doubt ; and that the Chaffinch, though 

 by many considered as a pure feeder on insects, does the same, 

 particularly in early spring, when he inflicts ruinous injury on 

 the sprouting crops of several plants, is equally true. Sparrows, 

 too, burrow in our stacks, and consume a certain quantity of 

 corn not, indeed, in the same serious quantities that another 

 bird does, called the Snow-Bunting : these birds, in hard 

 winters, come from the north in prodigious flocks, and, where 

 they take up their quarters, become quite a nuisance not so 

 much by what they consume as by what they destroy ; which 

 they do thus : in search of grain, they frequent the stack, and 

 then seizing the end of a straw, deliberately draw it out To 

 such a degree has this been done by them, that the base of a 

 rick has been found entirely surrounded by the straw, one end 

 resting on the ground, the other against the stack, as it slid 

 down from the top, and as regularly placed as if by hand : and 

 so completely was the thatching pulled off, that it was found 

 necessary to remove the corn. 



That some guess may be formed of the possible extent of 

 good or evil occasioned by small birds, we annex the result 

 of our own observations on the precise quantity of food con- 

 sumed by certain birds, either for their own support, or that 

 of their young ; remarking, at the same time, that the differ- 

 ence observed in the instances may be partly accounted for 

 by the different quantity of food required by young birds at 

 different periods of their growth. 



Sparrows feed their young 36 times in an hour, which, calculating 

 at the rate of 14 hours a day, in the long days of spring and summer, 

 gives 3500 times per week a number corroborated on the autho- 

 rity of another writer, who calculated the number of caterpillars 

 destroyed in a week to be about 3400. 



Redstarts were observed to feed their young with little green 

 jfrubs from gooseberry-trees 23 times in an hour, which, at the same 



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