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BIRDS. 
BIRDS. 
The song of birds is one of the most exhila¬ 
rating pleasures of country life. Everybody 
should encourage their presence—with some ex¬ 
ceptions. Aside from their delicious melody, 
and their familiar, gentle habits, they do us in¬ 
finite benefit in the destruction of insects so 
annoying to our labors, and frequently so de¬ 
structive to our hopes of the coming fruit, grain 
and vegetable harvests. Let the young children 
be taught to love the birds, and not to destroy 
nor disturb their nests. Birds find out who their 
friends are as readily as human beings do, as 
their annual and continued presence at those 
spots where they are kindly treated, and their 
absence from those at which they are disturbed, 
most strikingly indicate. 
The same warbling little birds for consecu¬ 
tive years have built their cozy nests in the 
same honeysuckles near our windows, and 
poured forth their sweet melody from the same 
branches in the lawn, while their innocent 
progeny have colonised in the neighboring 
shrubbery and trees, and every year they re¬ 
turn to gladden our home with their joyous 
company. While we now write, a most enter¬ 
prising cat bird has dropped her peevish mew, 
and is emulating the mocking bird, as she fre¬ 
quently does, in throwing olf her richest notes 
in the sun and breeze of a July morning from 
the branches of an adjacent willow. 
We have said “ with some exceptions” the 
birds should be encouraged. It is difficult to 
enumerate all the birds that should be welcomed 
to your premises. Their names are almost 
legion. We should require the volumes of Au¬ 
dubon to give a full list of the varieties, and 
therefore name the chief among the exceptions. 
We take it that you grow fruits of all kinds 
which flourish out of doors in your climate; and 
that you also grow grain and vegetables. All 
birds, not of prey, feed more or less on grubs 
or insects; therefore, according as they spend 
their time with us, they are useful in destroying 
them, and of consequence do us a benefit. Yet, 
in the balance sheet of profit and loss, some of 
them stand charged on the wrong side of the 
account 
In this little category, we will begin with the 
cr0 w—and most heartily do we wish that we 
never knew the hateful creature. Some people 
who have more sympathy than discrimination, 
advocate the crow, and say that his destruction of 
worms, grubs, and beetles more than compensates 
for the damage he commits. All that we have to | 
reply on this head is, that we wish all such peo- j 
pie had our crows for one season. They would 
change their opinion. In the first place, he has 
neither song nor beauty—nothing but that per¬ 
petual, impudent c-r-a-w, c-r-a-w , to harrass your 
musical nerves, and his black, unseemly carcass, 
to vex your eyes. With the early sowing of 
your spring wheat, he is forever in your fields, 
scratching, pulling, and devouring; and from 
that to the barley, peas, and oats. On your 
springing corn field, he is both the walking and 
flying embodiment of “ war, pestilence, and fam¬ 
ine,” making your labor twice or three times 
over, and demanding of'you the full time of the 
coming Sunday to rid your heart of the perilous 
stuff that a week’s impatience, bad temper, and 
imprecations have committed. He attacks your 
cherries, your apples—I had a large young 
orchard of fine apples carried off piece meal 
by them last year—your fruits of all kinds, 
that he dare approach; and in the harvest sea¬ 
son he is at his plunder again on everything in 
general. Now don’t tell of shooting, poison, and 
scare crows ! He can smell powder as far off* as 
you can see him; his insatiable maw is poison 
proof; and scarecrows are his most intimate 
friends, for I have often seen him. perched 
upon the top of one’s shoulder. In short, the 
crow is an abominable nuisance—gluttonous, 
filthy, and obscene. Destroy them in any and 
all ways possible. They deserve no quarter, 
young nor old, at your hands. For every grub 
or caterpillar they destroy they take ten times 
the worth in grain or fruit, and do you no good 
whatever. If it be said that “rid yourself of 
the crows and | your diminished crops would 
suffer for it,” we answer that there are large 
districts of our best agricultural country where 
no crows are seen, and the favored inhabitants 
have not yet discovered the want of them. 
The red-headed woodpecker is another bird 
of no value. He is not 
« The woodpecker tapping at the hollow boech tree,” 
in Moore’s agreeable song, and a far different 
bird from the “yellow-bellied woodpecker” of 
Wilson and Audubon, and “ ) r ellow hammer,” 
and “ wakeup ” of the country people, which 
last is a bird of agreeable and early song, and 
mainly harmless. The red-headed woodpecker 
is frequently injurious to young fruit trees in 
perforating their bark, which he does not 
always to catch insects beneath it; for in his 
capricious hammerings he more frequently 
bores into the healthiest among the orchard 
| trees than into the diseased ones. He carries 
| off* your young cherries, even before they are 
