i88 3 .] 
and Allies Reconsidered . 
655 
Whether his good deeds among cockchaffers, Elaters, and 
noxious larvae fairly compensate his work among various 
crops is hard to decide. 
The thrush group, as it has been often pointed out, hold 
also an ambiguous position. Did they merely take “ a little 
fruit as certain writers euphemistically express it — they 
might live in our good graces. But where they are plentiful 
and have been fed through the winter they display their 
gratitude by taking “ not some, but all.” Long before the 
crop is ripe they make numerous trial borings, never finishing 
a fruit. The damage thus begun is carried on by wasps, 
flies, earwigs, &c., and by rain, and the fruit in consequence 
rots before it can ripen. Scarecrows, however cunningly 
devised, lose their terrors in at most three or four days. 
Nets are not easily applied to standard trees, and are in any 
case certain to keep off an appreciable portion of the sun- 
shine, rarely too abundant in Britain. 
Last and worst, of the feathered race comes the sparrow. 
Not, indeed, that a particle of evidence has turned up in his 
favour. All the intelligence that comes to hand from 
countries where he has been indiscreetly acclimatised — e.g., 
the United States — points in one and the same direction. 
Careful observers there have not merely watched closely the 
doings, the goings, and comings of the sparrow, but have 
from time to time shot a specimen, and opening his crop 
made an examination of its contents. The result has been 
most condemnatory : three-fourths at least of the food of the 
sparrow are in this manner proved to consist not of cater- 
pillars, gnats, and the like, but of fruit, grain, and other 
matter which man preserves to reserve for his own con- 
sumption. We can pronounce this bird, therefore, frugivo- 
rous from choice and occasionally insectivorous from 
necessity, with a general tendency to mischief. Thus one 
observer, finding the sparrows apparently hard at work in 
some vines, left them for a time unmolested, in the belief 
that they were ridding the vines of some injurious inseCt. 
On closer examination he found that they were biting off the 
fruit-buds, eating, however, little of what they thus destroyed, 
but throwing the fragments to the ground in superfluity of 
naughtiness. The owner’s prospeCt of a crop of grapes for 
the season was thus effectually cut off. 
Another sin of the sparrow is manifested as strikingly in 
America as in Europe, — the war, too often successful, which 
it wages against the harmless and useful swallow. The 
helpless young swallows are often dragged from the nest and 
thrown to the ground, and the parent birds, on their return. 
