Birirs.—No. 17. [1st to ^th Thousand] 
THE BIRDS AS LABOURERS. 
THEIR WORK AND WAGES. 
S HAVE been looking through the list of British birds to 
see how many species included in it are or are 
supposed to be injurious. Putting hawks and owls out of the 
question, * I can only find thirty-seven species against which I 
have ever heard any charges brought of damaging the agricul¬ 
turist, horticulturist, or fruit-farmer in England. From this 
list of thirty-seven species I must immediately remove eight, 
because the damage done by them is so slight as to be almost 
unappreciable. These eight species are the robin, whitethroat, 
lesser whitethroat, garden warbler, and blackcap, whose offence 
is that they take a little of our (often wasting) small fruits 
quite late in the summer ; the nuthatch, which will steal nuts ; 
the linnet, which may do some damage to swede—and turnip- 
seed crops, although no complaint has yet reached me ; and 
the twite, which is said to damage newly-sprouting corn in the 
Shetlands, and therefore may do some damage in England, 
although personally I am not aware of any that it does, and I 
know the flocks which come south in winter, prefer the sea¬ 
shore and muddy estuaries. The house-sparrow I must leave 
out of my remarks entirely in this place. 
We have remaining twenty-eight species. There are four 
of the thrush family, which take some fruit in summer, but 
which live during the rest of the year on worms, slugs, snails 
(of which they consume a large quantity), grubs and (in 
autumn and severe weather), wild berries. We have four 
titmice or tomtits, and the detailed evidence I think proves 
* All farmers and gardeners should, of course, protect those destroyers of field-mice 
and rats, the owls and the kestrel. 
