[ 4 ] 
finch has been observed to eat 238 thistle seeds in twenty minutes, 
though unstintingly provided with hemp-seed. 
The birds might claim a percentage of the crop in return for 
their weeding ; but they do not claim the twenty-five per cent, that 
has been known to fall before the grubs of the diamond-backed 
moth, 241 of which have been counted on one turnip plant. In 
place of such a demand the birds eat the grubs. 
Another class of labourer is represented by the tits. A man 
who possesses the smallest strip of garden gains some com¬ 
prehension of the character of weeds, and must have observed a 
thrush breaking a snail shell, and a blackbird pulling an earthworm 
out of the ground. But the insect food of the tits is of the minute 
and infinitely destructive species with which man is still more 
helpless to deal. 
It includes weevils, various insects, and larvae that ensconce 
themselves within young buds, and also that mysterious plague 
commonly known as ‘‘ blight,” and more scientifically as aphides or 
green-fly. A blue tit may be seen attacking the buds of a fruit 
tree with vigour and persistence ; but rarely indeed does this small 
gardener make a mistake in his business, which is to get at the grub 
within. Some wonderfully acute sense enables him to divine which 
bud is the abode of the creature that would be the destruction, not 
of one only, but of many buds, and this grub it is that is the tit’s 
tit-bit. Tits are now admitted by the Board of Agriculture to be 
among the most useful of birds in garden and orchard ; and while 
their occasional onslaughts on pears and apples are at once seen 
and noted against them, it may be confidently presumed that their 
services are in fact very great—far greater than is recognised. 
Trees attacked even by bullfinches have frequently been known 
to yield the finest fruit in the garden, though no bird has a worse 
reputation among gardeners. 
Certainly no bullfinch, whatever his sins, was ever such a terror 
to the gardener, such a formidable, incontestable enemy, as the 
minute aphis, so sudden in its coming, so marvellous in its rate of 
increase. It is not a showy visitor like the bird. There are people 
who pay little heed to the small, weak, helpless-looking thing, and 
think that a pestilential wind has poisoned their plants. 
Nothing green and sappy, from the stately tree and the 
growing corn and the hop-bine, to the dainty pink and the queenly 
rose, comes amiss to the ever hungry aphis, which spends all its 
days in sucking up sap and in multiplying its kind. One green- fly 
to-day means about sixteen thousand green-flies in a we.ek, for one 
insect will produce twenty-five perfect young ones in a day, and 
each of those twenty-five will be ready to produce twenty-five more 
