OPINIONS DAMAGE TO CORN. 133 



successful advocate. He avers, that pigeons do not 

 feed upon green corn that their bills have not suf- 

 ficient power to dig for seeds in the earth, and that 

 they only pick up scattered grains which would else 

 be wasted, or become the prey of other birds. From 

 the season of the corn appearing, he says, pigeons 

 subsist upon the seeds of weeds, the multiplication 

 of which they must, in consequence, greatly prevent. 



Another writer has of late introduced a story of 

 the farmers in a certain district .in England, who, 

 finding their corn and pulse crops greatly reduced, 

 attributed it to the vast quantity of pigeons kept 

 among them, which, on such account, by a general 

 resolution, they agreed to destroy. A few seasons 

 afterwards, it seems, they found their land so ex- 

 hausted, and their crops so eaten up by weeds, that 

 they came to a general wish for their pigeons back 

 again. Now this is either a lame story, or the fann- 

 ers implicated were very lame farmers, as being ig- 

 norant how to weed their land, without the assist- 

 ance of instruments, the use of which must cost them 

 so considerable a part of their crops. Last year, a 

 farmer in Kent shot a wood-pigeon, from the crop 

 of which he extracted nine hundred and twenty-six 

 clavels of wheat, which he sowed, and obtained from 

 them a harvest of one gallon three quarts of fine 

 wheat. 



No man, in the least acquainted with country af- 

 fairs, but is fully aware of the immense damage done 

 to the crops of corn, beans, pease, and tares, that 

 is to say, the grand articles of human subsistence, by 

 pigeons. Our best practical agricultural writers may 



