174 "^11^ CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



THE VARIOUS CROPS OF AN APPLE ORCHARD 



AN APPLE orchard is sure to bear you several crops 

 beside the apple. There is the crop of sweet and 

 tender reminiscences, dating from childhood and 

 spanning the seasons from May to October, and making 

 the orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You 

 have played there as a child, mused there as a \'outh or 

 lover, strolled there as a thoughtful, sad-eyed man. Your 

 father, perhaps, planted the trees or reared them from the 

 seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted them, and 

 worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiar 

 history and meaning in your mind. 



Then there is the never-failing crop of birds — robins, 

 goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds, orioles, 

 starlings — all nesting and breeding in tree-branches and 

 fitly described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden 

 and Orchard." Whether the Pippin and Sweet Bough 

 bear or not, the "punctual birds" can always be depended 

 upon. Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithol- 

 ogy than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, 

 many of the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to visit 

 it during the season. The cuckoo comes for the tent-cater- 

 pillar, the jay for frozen apples, the ruffed grouse for buds, 

 the crow foraging for birds' eggs, the woodpecker and 

 chickadees for their food, and the highhole for ants. The 

 redbird comes, too, if only to see what a friendly covert its 

 branches form, and the wood-thrush now and then comes 

 out of the grove near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, 

 the robin. The smaller hawks know that this is a most 

 likely spot for their prey, and in the spring the shy nor- 

 thern warblers may be studied as they pause to feed on the 

 fine insects amid its branches. 



The mice love to dwell here also, and hither come, from 

 the near woods, the squirrel and the rabbit. The latter will 

 put his head through the boy's slipper-noose an)^ time for a 

 taste of the sweet apple, and the red squirrel and chipmunk 

 esteem its seeds a great rarity. — John Burroughs. 



