SCARECROWS

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6596, 7 May 1925, Page 2

SCARECROWS

FASHIONS IN THEM, TOO There are fashions in scarecrows, as in most things; and a country walk will reveal quite a number of devices intended- to scare the birds. Whether they actually do so, is of course, another thing (writes H. L. C. Johns in Open Air.) - For example, there is the old familiar type of scarecrow, or “bogie,” as the Scotsman calls it, with torn, flapping garments, and sometimes a formidable straw gun tucked under one arm. The birds seem, for the most part, to treat this colossal fraud as a huge joke. They perch confidently on its shoulders, and—crowning indignity—at the end of their meal wipe their beaks upon its battered top-hat!

Some birds have an uncanny knack of distinguishing between objects that are harmful and those which are inocuous; and not all the flashing and jangling in the world will suffice to keep them away. The farmer, not unnaturally, knows this; and that is why, in certain fields, there are improvised gibbets set up at irregular intervals with a victim dangling from each. Lying in wait for the feathered pests, the farmer shoots two or three of them, and afterwards hangs them up as a warning to their too venturesome relatives. Nor is this warning neglected; for succeeding flocks will greet the gruesome objects with discordant squawks, and thereafter give that field a wide birth!

Down in the western countries there are sometimes large fields of growing corn in which there are no scarecrows visible at all. Yet, despite the tempting nature of the display, there are seldom any rooks or wood pigeons in them.' The reason for this is curious. No sooner has a particular field been sown and harrowed by the farmer than the birds give it a wide birth, for he is accustomed to set in it cleverly-concealed traps and guns. In the end the unwary kind is sure to bunder into one of these snares; Promptly he kicks up a terrible to do; whereupon his more fortunate companions seem to receive such a dreadful fright that they at once clear out' and do not come near that particular field for many weeks afterwards.

Where smaller birds are concerned not infrequently use is made of certain colours. Sparrows, for example, are susceptible to sush influence, and a few sheets of bright blue paper hung in the' vicihity say, of gooseberry trees, or red currant bushes will at once scare off all the sparrows in the neighbourhood. -' Fruit growers use long waving streamers of yellow wood shavings to keep finches away from their cherry: trees; while a loose mesh of fine black cotton, stretched criss-cross fashion . above the seed bed, has lung-been-a favourite device of the country man for keeping avian thieves away from his newly-planted peas. . . ■