FIELD NOTES. 285 



small worm, or part of one, and on other lawns I have seen them, 

 through the glasses, get fat white or whitish -grey grubs, which 

 had no doubt lain amongst the grass-roots. Such grubs, it is 

 to be presumed, do much damage, so that the Starlings, by de- 

 stroying them, must be a benefit to gardens. En revanche, they 

 certainly eat fruit, but very crowded orchards co- exist, in the 

 West of England, with immense flights of Starlings, and whilst 

 fruit is only to be procured in the autumn, worms, slugs, insects 

 and their larvae, are destroyed throughout the year. Starlings 

 are nothing like so plentiful in Suffolk, where I live, as they are 

 in the neighbourhood of Gloucester and Cheltenham, and fruit, 

 especially orchard fruit, is in the same relative proportion. To 

 me it seems that the one is a corollary of the other, and, if so, 

 why need fruit-growers be afraid, seeing that the very abundance 

 of the Starlings proceeds from the abundance of their apples and 

 pears ? Certainly they lose something, but how ample is the 

 margin of profit, and how must this be increased by the multi- 

 tude of insects slain all the year round ! But they cannot see 

 it in this way. This is not all theory. I have watched numbers 

 of Starlings in a great orchard, and for every one that was peck- 

 ing a pear there seemed to me to be hundreds of thousands of 

 pears untouched ; whilst all about stood great baskets crammed 

 with them to overflowing. The birds have simply not time, and 

 are not sufficiently gathered in any one spot to do much damage 

 in proportion to the huge amount of fruit, and what they do do 

 I believe they pay for, for they feed all day long over the grass- 

 fields. Again, it is asserted that the roosting of Starlings in 

 such great numbers destroys the woods. I do not know what 

 the evidence of this is. In the roosting-place that I am best 

 acquainted with there is certainly a pungent smell, but everything 

 seems growing in the same way as elsewhere. Moreover, how- 

 ever large the numbers, the actual space required for their sleep- 

 ing accommodation is very small. The fact is that the mere sight 

 of birds or other animals congregated together in great numbers 

 has an irritating effect on very many people. They are moved 

 not so much to interest and observation as to " slaughterous 

 thoughts." " They want thinning," "We could do with a few 

 less of them," &c. In fact, the deep-seated instinct of killing — 

 which is all that " sport" really is — is aroused by the sight of so 



