136 WILD SPOUTS OF THE HIGHLANDS chap. 



destructiop of their natural enemies. The wood-pigeon ' in par- 

 ticular has multiplied to a great extent. The farmers complain 

 constantly to me of the mischief done by these ' birds, whom I 

 cannot defend by giving them the credit of atoning for their 

 consumption of corn by an equal or greater consumption of 

 grubs and other noxious insects, as they feed wholly on seeds 

 and vegetables. An agricultural friend of mine near this place, 

 who had yielded with a tolerably good grace to my arguments 

 in favour of the rook, pointed out to me the other day (March 

 6th) an immense flock of wood-pigeons busily at work on a field 

 of young clover which had been under barley the last season. 

 " There," he said, " you constantly say that every bird does 

 more good than harm ; what good are those birds doing to my 

 young clover ? " On this, in furtherance of my favourite axiom, 

 that every wild animal is of some service to us, I determined to 

 shoot some of the wood-pigeons, that I might see what they 

 actually were feeding on ; for I did not at all fall into my 

 friend's idea that they were grazing on his clover. By watching 

 in their line of flight from the field to the woods, and sending 

 a man round to drive them off the clover, I managed to kill 

 eight of the birds as they flew over my head. I took them to 

 his house, and we opened their crops to see what they contained. 

 Every pigeon's crop was as full as it could possibly be of the 

 seeds of two of the worst weeds in the country, the wild mustard 

 and the ragweed, which they had found remaining on the surface 

 of the ground, these plants ripening and dropping their seeds 

 before the corn is cut. Now no amount of human labour and 

 search could have collected on the same ground, at that time of 

 the year, as much of these seeds as was consumed by each of 

 these five or six hundred wood-pigeons daily, for two or three 

 weeks together. Indeed, during the whole of the summer and 

 spring, and a considerable part of the winter, all pigeons must 

 feed ' entirely on the seeds of different wild plants, as no grain 

 is to be obtained by these soft-billed birds excepting immediately 



' C. falumbus (wood-pigeon or ring-dove) feeds on small potatoes. — C. St. J. 



Very abundant in cultivated districts, yet "its first appearance is an event actually 

 within the recollection of old people now living in the county (East Lothian) in which the 

 species is most abundant. About eighty years ago it was quite unknown there. The 

 introduction of the clovers and turnip affected this increase." From December 1862 to 

 6th June 1870, 130,440 of these birds were killed under the auspices of the United East 

 Lothian Agricultural Society, yet no perceptible diminution of the nuisance has taken 

 place. Of course the native birds are largely reinforced by migratory flocks every winter. 

 Jt is very injurious to the farmer from %hs amount of grain which it eats (Gray, p. 21 j). 



