BIRDS AND FRUIT.
"Eat More Fruit" is an injunction most conscientiously observed by the birds in dry weather. In my garden every codlin that falls is eaten out within a few hours by many sorts of birds, some not usually placed in the fruit-eating class. For example, I watched a robin, that engrooved flesh-eater, making a large meal off a codling fragment. Tits and blackbirds and starlings have all attacked apples while still on the tree and the trick is new in my experience, at this date in the year, though starlings, of course, are great devourers of any apples left on the trees in late autumn. The mammals share in the feast ; and the rats have been hungry enough to burrow down to the garden turnips. The chief vegetable.• eaters among the birds have been tits and jays, both of which have a pretty taste in garden peas.
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