PEOTECTIOIf. 



41 



The next consideration is when to give protection. 

 Unless frost be so severe as to cut off the leaf-buds, the 

 blossom-buds are pretty safe until they begin to swell 

 out quite plump. From that time they want protec- 

 tion from frost, but they should not be deprived of any 

 sunshine there may be. The time of the greatest 

 danger to them is when the blossom is fully open, then 

 if frost gets to it the pistil turns black, and the fruit is 

 nowhere. "When the fruit is formed and swells out 

 plump, it is comparatively safe, but even long after that 

 frost, snow, hail, and bitter winds may cut it off, and 

 strew it in unsatisfactory showers around the tree. 

 Eegin, therefore, to protect before the blossom opens, 

 and judgment, the locality and the weather, must decide 

 when to take off the screens. 



Our late frosts are our fruit's worst enemies ; com- 

 pared with the mischief they do, that worked by birds 

 is small, and has, as compensation, great destruction of 

 insects, more destructive by far than they. Carefully 

 avoid injuring, as the garden's best friends, the wood- 

 wren, the willow-wren or haybird, the golden-crested 

 wren, the chiff-chaff, the nightingale, the whinchat, the 

 stonechat, and the wheatear. Spare also the wagtails, 

 the tree-pipet, or titlark, the meadow-pipet, the cuckoo, 

 the fly-catcher, the flusher or lesser butcher-bird, and 

 many others. 



The common wren, the hedge-sparrow, the robin, 

 the redstart, the tomtit, the coaltit, the marshtit, and 

 the greater tit, eat some small fruit, and a little seed 

 and grain, but pay for it all over and over again by the 

 weeds and insects they destroy. 



The blackcap, the babillard, the garden-warbler, the 

 whitethroat, the missel-thrush, the song-thrush, and the 

 blackbird, certainly do consume cherries and other fruit 

 with little moderation, especially the thrushes and 

 blackbirds, but they eat also so many insects, that it is 

 better to scare them away at the time they can destroy 

 most than to kill them. 



Inventions for scaring birds must be constantly, 

 entirely, and radically altered, as they soon get so 



