i9o;.] 



Birds and Fruit Growers. 



667 



the disbudding of gooseberries, currants, plums, and cherries, is 

 done by sparrows, because the devastation is often so speedy and 

 extensive that other bud-eating birds are not numerous enough 

 to account for the whole of it. The sparrow and the chaffinch are 

 further charged with squeezing the blossom of cherries, plums, 

 gooseberries, and currants to extract honey from them. The 

 chaffinch, however, according to Mr. Hooper, is also a destroyer 

 of caterpillars and the woolly aphis, and therefore it is not to 

 be placed in the worst class of birds with the sparrow and the 

 bullfinch, though it can hardly be said to deserve protection. 



Last season a small plantation of gooseberries close to my 

 homestead, where sparrows abound, was almost entirely ruined, 

 the crop being only about one-tenth of what it should have been,, 

 in consequence of disbudding. This loss of a year's crop, more- 

 ov^er, was not by any means all the damage ; for many of the 

 bushes had to be cut back to mere stumps, because the branches - 

 had been almost entirely denuded of buds, rendering them 

 permanently barren. In a plantation of eight acres, too, the 

 crop of gooseberries was more than half destroyed on fully an 

 acre on the outsides, convenient for birds harboured in the hedges,,, 

 while much damage was also done to the interior of the field. 

 The bushes had been sprayed with a protecting mixture, which 

 was effective until persistent rain had washed it off. Then, in 

 two or three days, during which inspection of the plantation had 

 been neglected, the damage was done. A second spraying was 

 then carried out, which checked, if it did not absolutely prevent, 

 further devastation. In the same season plum trees on the 

 hedge sides of a plantation had both fruit and leaf buds picked 

 off to a serious extent, nearly all the young shoots being stripped,, 

 so that they had to be cut off at their bases. Further, sixteen 

 fine trees of such choice varieties as Old Greengage, Coe's 

 Golden Drop, Denniston's Superb Gage, Oullin's Golden Gage,, 

 Reine Claude Violette, and Early Transparent Gage, covered 

 with fruit spurs, had their fruit buds so generally picked off by 

 birds that the whole of them did not show fifty blossoms. 



Such examples of injury, which nearly every grower of fruit on 

 a considerable scale could match, may fairly be regarded as suffi- 

 cient indictments to justify the unrestricted destruction of spar- 

 r<3ws and bullfinches, and the thinning of chaffinches, and greeii 



