Abstract
DURING the past few years birds have received an increased amount of attention, for it has become more generally recognised that the whole question of their food supply is of great importance to British agriculture—using this term in its widest sense. There are plenty of individuals who rightly recognise that many of our avian fauna are of much economic value, while there are also, unfortunately, a far greater number who thoughtlessly stigmatise the majority of birds—or at least birds of a certain class, e.g. owls—as useless and harmful. These less enlightened sons of the soil need showing that the majority of British birds are useful, but the showing is far from easy. It has been demonstrated over and over again that the sparrow, or “the avian rat,” as Mr. Tegetmeier terms it, is entirely harmful; Yarrell has stated that the kestrel principally subsists on mice; a case is mentioned by Macgillivray in which food was brought to the nestlings by a pair of flycatchers no fewer than 537 times in a day; and the writer has himself observed a single starling carry food to its young from a grass paddock 18 times in 15 minutes; and hundreds of similar records have served to demonstrate in some sense that many birds are useful, and confer an immense benefit on mankind.
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Birds in Relation to Agriculture 1 . Nature 79, 254–255 (1908). https://doi.org/10.1038/079254a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/079254a0