I was surprised to hear that on the large plantations the men employed
were not allowed to use shot, the aim of the fruit grower being only to
scare the birds away. I had a talk with my old friend of the wryneck on
the subject, and told him that I had seen one of the bird-scarers going
home to his cottage very early in the morning, carrying a bunch of about
a dozen blackbirds and thrushes he had just shot.

Yes, he replied, some of the men would buy shot and use it early in the
morning before their master was about; but if the man I had seen had
been detected in the act, he would have been discharged on the spot. It
was not only because the trees would be injured by shot, but this
fruitgrower was friendly to birds.

Most fruit-growers, I said, were dead against the birds, and anxious
only to kill as many of them as possible.

It might be so in some places, he answered, but not in the village. He
himself and most of the villagers depended, in a great measure, on the
fruit they produced for a living, and their belief was that, taking one
bird with another all the year round, the birds did them more good than
harm.

I then imparted to him the views on this bird subject of a well-known
fruit-grower in the north of England, Mr. Joseph Witherspoon, of
Chester-le-Street. He began by persecuting the birds, as he had been
taught to do by his father, a market-gardener; but after years of
careful observation he completely changed his views, and is now so
convinced of the advantage that birds are to the fruit-grower, that he
does all in his power to attract them, and to tempt them to breed in his