

INSECTS AND BIRDS. 105 



often nip off the buds of trees, but in most instances 

 they thereby cut off in each bud a whole colony of 

 caterpillars. Buds are never a favourite food with 

 birds, though some of the species that remain with us, 

 or visit us in the winter months, have recourse to them 

 after all other kinds of food are exhausted. Generally 

 speaking, they are all, however, in quest of insects in 

 some stage or other of their existence, in the spring 

 months ; and as they carry on their hunting with great 

 vigour, until their broods be able to provide for them- 

 selves, they annually cut off as many destroyers as, but 

 for them, would produce famine in the most fertile 

 country. 



The insects which the birds thus consume for their 

 own food and that of their callow young, by so many 

 myriads, have no doubt their use in the economy of 

 nature, as well as the others. We know that the 

 insects and the parasitical fungi consume substances, 

 of which the decomposition in the air would be dis- 

 agreeable, because we find that they resort to those 

 substances. It may be, too, that there is some good in 

 the havoc which they commit among the vegetable 

 tribes, however much it may interfere with our opera- 

 tions. The germs of life are so thick every where that 

 there is really no room for them in the world, if the one 

 were not so constituted as to put down the other ; one 

 single plant might be made to clothe a whole country 

 to the prevention of all other vegetation, in the course 

 of a few years. Were it not for the goldfinches, thistles 

 and ragweed would soon become intolerable ; and, in 

 spite of all the means by which they are destroyed, 

 there is really no place free from the winged seeds of 



