332 
Wild Birds in Rekttion to Agricidturo, 
When other birds are gone and spent. 
Then sparrows are most excellent. 
One witness, a large market gardener, born to the business, had, 
he said, “ the blood of a great many sparrows on his hands ” — a 
sparrow club — he was in consequence eaten up by blight and 
insects.* Sparrows, that market gardener found, do more good 
than harm ; ^ they eat the larvae of one of our greatest enemies, 
the green caterpillar, the ravager of gooseberry leaves. “ What 
I lose by sparrows,” quoth he, “ I consider as wages paid to good 
servants, for ten months of the year they do good, for two months, 
perhaps some evil.® Another witness, a non-scientific man, a 
practical farmer in Leicestershire, had on his farm 30 acres of 
fruit trees. His father killed all the birds he could ; the result 
was “ we had no leaves on our gooseberry trees, and we lost our 
fruit entirely.” A Lincolnshire justice testified : “ I have seen 
a cock spaiTow hawking at the white butterfly in the sun, like a 
hawk after a heron ; the sparrow thus kills tens of thousands of 
the eggs which produce the cabbage caterpillar : he takes the evil 
in the egg.” ® 
In regard to rooks, the evidence tendered to the Commons’ 
Committee bears out ]\Iiss Oi-merod’s observation — namely, that 
the good or evil done by these birds depends much on surround- 
ing circumstances. A well-known Scotch farmer told the 
Commons’ Committee that the rooks are hard on patches of laid 
corn ; nineteen-twentieths of their food consists of insects, and 
very destructive ones, too — tipula grubs, crane-fly grubs, and a 
great many beetles. Rooks, in the witness’s opinion, should be 
regulated but neither persecuted nor protected.® 
Again, the Rev. F. 0. Morris, a very high authority, sub- 
mitted this calculation : A rook requires at least 11b. of food in 
a week, and of this nine-tenths are insects and worms. A 
rookery of 10,000 rooks will consume in one year 209 tons of 
worms, insects, and their larvae.^ ; 
The views expressed by my lady correspondent in regard to 
birds of prey, and indeed also as regard small birds, are fully 
borne out by the evidence taken by the Commons’ Committee. 
All the owls are much valued by naturalists ; rats and mice 
are their principal food.® When 1 was a young man I remember 
at Thornton-le-Street plenty of white owls, such beauties, but 
every man’s hand— or rather trigger-finger —was against them. 
Our ancestors, wiser than we are, always made in their great 
barns ingress for owls — an owl hole — with often a stone perch.® * 
Passing over the effect the destruction of birds of prey has had in 
> 329. ■■= 333. » 339 < 1742. 
^ 446. ® 1250. » 1201. « 40. > 1022. 
