BIRDS

Syn. A′ves , L. Birds, besides their value as food, play an important part in the economy of organic nature, and particularly in that of the vegetable kingdom. They are the best friends of the agriculturist and the gardener; and their presence, in numbers, appears e ential to keep down the innumerable races of insects that prey upon our cereals, fruits, and culinary vegetables. M. Florent Prevost, who has for fifty years presided over the Natural History Museum of Paris, and who has, like the ancient Roman augurs, examined the entrails and stomach of fowls with scientific curiosity, avers, as the result of his long experience, that birds, of whatever sort, are an unmitigated ble ing to the farmer, and that the detritus and organic particles found by inspection of them in whole hecatombs, which, by the a istance of the Royal Forest Rangers, he has sacrificed on the altar of utility, show an immense preponderance of insect corpuscula in their digestive organs, whilst the traces of cereal or other valuable products are infinitesimal in comparison. It is found that even sparrows, rooks, and owls—three of the feathered tribe the most persecuted by the farmer—are, in reality, the faithful and vigilant conservators of his fruits and crops. In one of the smaller states of Germany, where, owing to public rewards being given to their destroyers, the whole race of sparrows were exterminated, the crops failed to such an alarming extent that it became nece ary to offer large premiums for the reintroduction of these useful birds from other parts. In some of the agricultural districts of France, where the destruction of small birds has been carried on with relentle activity for years, insects have so prodigiously multiplied as to attack everything green around them. Even the forest trees are, in many cases, denuded of leaves by them, and are rapidly perishing. Venomous species of caterpillars, previously scarcely known except to entomologists, have now become common; and cases of children losing their lives from attacks of them whilst bird nesting have been published in newspapers. [177] In our own country the extension of sparrow-clubs—a ociations disgraceful to the boasted intelligence of the nineteenth century—threatens similar results. Already the gardener finds his fruit-crops le ening year by year; and that many of them, particularly of the smaller and sweeter fruits, have become so precarious, that they now scarcely pay for cultivation. In our own neighbourhood, where small birds have for some years been destroyed by bushels at a time, it is almost impo ible to raise a currant, gooseberry, cherry, or plum; whilst seedling flowers and culinary vegetables often entirely disappear on the first night after being planted, or are so completely deprived of the succulent portion of their leaves and stems, that the remaining skeleton of network in a few days withers and dies. But this is not all—the columns of our diurnals bring us continual reports of failing grain-crops in the neighbourhoods in which these bird-clubs have existed for any length of time, and that even on land previously remarkable for its fertility. [178] Did this lo fall only on the benighted beings who so wilfully cast back the ble ings of an all-wise protecting Providence, it would be a just retribution; but, unfortunately, it affects the whole nation, and threatens, ere long, unle arrested by legislation, to prove a national calamity. The only apparent remedy for the evil, at present, is the diffusion of information tending to show that the farmer and the gardener, in destroying small birds, destroy their best friends. [177] A striking fatal case of this description is given in the ‘Times’ of June 12, 1862. [178] See the ‘Times’ and other leading ‘journals’ for 1862. [For further information respecting birds, see Aves , Bird ( antè ), Game , German Paste , Nests (Edible), Poultry , Putrefaction , Taxidermy , Tru ing , .]