THE ZooLoGist—NovEMBER, 1872. 3295 
chalky, I can stand and see seven large rookeries within a radius 
of three miles. Now, for at least nine months in the year, these 
hosts of rooks are purely insectivorous; and they may be easily 
compelled to be so for the remaining three months. When the 
autumn and spring corn is being sowed, and until after the spire 
or blade is well out of ground, it is absolutely necessary in large 
fields to employ a man with a gun, and also when the corn is in 
sheaf, but not so when it is ripening; then a very simple device 
will keep them off much more effectually than any gun, unless 
always present. I buy a pound of good strong crochet-cotton, 
which costs, I think, about four shillings: this is wound off into 
balls rather larger than a cricket-ball. I cut then a number of 
sticks about half-an-inch in diameter and two feet long: these are 
stuck in the ground by the side of the corn, and about fifteen yards 
apart. J then run down by this row of sticks, paying the cotton 
out as I go, aud tying it with a double knot at each stick, and 
about a foot from the ground. No rooks will ever pull ears of corn 
over or under this barrier. To string a hundred and fifty acres of 
corn round in this manner is only a summer’s evening amusement 
for two persons—one to carry and stick in the sticks, and the other 
to follow and fasten on the cotton. Where this, or the gun, has 
been neglected, I have known a large flock of rooks to carry away 
and spoil five pounds’ worth of corn in a single day! By adopting 
the simple means I advise, rooks are driven to search behind the 
ploughs and in pastures for their favourite and legitimate food. 
Although perhaps the most useful of British birds, it was quite 
right not to include it in the schedule of “ wild birds” for protec- 
tion: we could scarcely have done away with our social meeting 
once a year for rook-shooting, or the cold rook-pie as an after 
luxury. I have never known a rookery decrease where the young 
rooks have been annually shot at, provided the birds are not 
persecuted more than one evening. 
Starling—A dear lover of ripe cherries, but of the utmost 
service in ridding pastures of the Jarve of Tipulz; also sheep of 
ticks. 
Owls.—Of these most useful birds I need say nothing beyond 
the fact that a pair of white owls with young will supply their 
nestlings with not less than fi/ty mice every night, and as they have 
a succession of broods during the summer it is almost impossible 
to estimate the benefit farmers derive from them. 
