for there have been fields this season, rich and full of promise at one time, and then as bare and stony as any bit of chalk-down after paring and burning. There is something really fearful in what most of us have read, and some of us have seen, of the way in which a certain order of farmers go to work to make their crops grow.
When barley is to be sown, it is probably just at the time when there should be young broods in the rookeries, and in trees and hedges and old walls all round about. The old rooks follow the sowers, and are busy in the fresh-moved soil; the farmer concludes they are gobbling up his grain, and he calls them names, and sets a boy to scare them off, or a man to blaze away at them in most vindictive style. The effect of this is to amuse the man, or put wages into the boy’s pocket, in the first place; and in the next to afford a halcyon existence to a million or more of unpleasant creatures who are hiding an inch below the soil. The farmer is favouring everybody but himself and his best friends, the rooks. He prevents the parents of the wire-worm from being disturbed, and is sowing the future subsistence of their children. His neighbour, who is sowing turnips or rape, behaves in the same way to the rooks, and gives subsistence in the same generous method to countless hosts of caterpillars. By the time the turnips are four or five inches high, and the rape four or five times as tall, the myriads which he has made happy will come forth in their might, under the stars, and feast at such a rate that the sound thereof will be as a shower of steady rain. If anything in the form of a census should be proposed, these beneficiaries of the farmer will be found inhabiting his field to the amount of fifty per square foot, at the depth of two inches. The favour of the farmer to these children of the Dart-moth is, however, short-lived. When he sees his turnip-field as bare as the public road, and his rape crop disappearing row by row from night to night, he perceives that something must be done. It is too late now to recall the rooks—besides that he is fully persuaded that they were after the seed and not the grubs. He must send for the boy who scared away the rooks, and this boy must bring others, and they must be paid so much per pint for the caterpillars which the rooks would have disposed of if the boy had not been paid so much per hour for driving them away from that excellent work.
This is no fancy picture. These very caterpillars have utterly destroyed acres upon acres of mangels and of carrots this very season: and one year they nearly starved the Germans. The Germans know how to lament aloud; and it is wonderful that their wail over their plague of caterpillars did not put us so far on our guard as to prevent our driving our rooks away from such a prey. There is another resource,—in some places. Where the peewit has been allowed to live it can stay this plague. It has stopped it in Dorsetshire, where the case would soon have been desperate. But we have so few peewits left! And that is the way in which we are met by discouragement when trying to deal with difficulties in which the birds might have helped us if we would have let them.
The farmer who still believes the rook to be his worst enemy, remarks that whatever else the caterpillar or wireworm or slug may do, they cannot root up, or throw over on its side a single root of mangel; whereas he sees with his own eyes that rooks have done it in a score of cases in a single row.—The fact is undeniable: but what makes the rooks take that trouble about a plant which they are not going to eat? The farmer thinks this is no business of his: but there he is wrong; for the rooks’ reason is the very point of the case. The reason is always the same:—viz., one or more grubs nestled in the root of the plant. The plants so infested are doomed; and the birds which root them up to get at the grubs are doing the work which no other creature could do, and saving the rest of the crop.
It is a piteous sight when the reward these grubbers meet with is being fed with poisoned grain. It is piteous to see them unable to fly, tumbling from the tree, or quivering in agony on the grass. The same thing can no longer be done by the same means; for the Act of last session, prohibiting the administration of poisoned grain, is already in force. But there are few signs that the real preservers of our country from the most vexatious and mortifying kind of dearth are likely at present to be either respected or made use of as they ought to be. The rooks are among the best friends of all who live by bread; yet we may meet with farmers in every agricultural county who curse the “black rascals,” and look sour on everybody who is unwilling to part with the village rookery, while they have not a word to say against the pheasants which half live on their grain; nor even against the hares which eat lanes through their young wheat, or make whole roods of the soil as bare as the caterpillars make the turnip-field.
“What, then, is to be done?” despondent gardeners, and even farmers, will ask. “Are we to go on letting our produce be devoured before our eyes by creatures which cannot appreciate it? Must wasps feed on the sunny side of a peach when sugar and water would suit them as well? Must mice eat out the heart of rare bulbs, brought over the sea at great cost, when an onion or a bit of cheese would answer all the purpose? Must birds nip off fruit buds in our orchards? and the insects bite off the stalks of the grain in our fields? and the rodents make holes for decay in twenty times as many turnips or mangels as they can eat? If so, we may as well yield up the battle, and surrender to the wild animals of all sorts and sizes the dominion over us.”
Why, no! I should not advise that: and I do not propose to make any such surrender myself. To me the case looks like this:—
Here we are entering upon, or we have fairly entered upon, a new system of agricultural and horticultural economy. We grow better produce, and more of it on a certain area, at a much greater primary cost. The condition of profit under the new methods is that waste should be prevented,—waste of time, labour, land and money alike. Waste by vermin must be guarded against, with other kinds of waste: and the more valuable our produce the more it is worth our while to take pains to guard our plants and fruits from their