“In winter the redbreast leaves the forest, draws near our farms, and even ventures into our houses in quest of food. God forbid, boys, that you should ever betray its confidence when, on a stormy winter’s day, it comes discreetly tapping with its beak on the window-pane, asking hospitality. Welcome the poor little famished creature, and it will pay you a hundred times over with its gentle warbling and its zeal in defending the fruits of the earth. “But enough about the slender-beaks. You ought by this time to appreciate the immense help we receive from these legions of insect-eaters which share the work of the fields, hedges, meadows, gardens, woods, and orchards, and wage incessant warfare on every sort of vermin that would destroy our harvests unless others than ourselves were constantly on the watch—others cleverer and endowed with sharper eyesight and greater patience for the unending hunt, and also having nothing else to do. I am not exaggerating, I assure you; without our insectivorous birds we should soon suffer from famine. Who, then, except an idiot with a mania for destruction, would dare touch the nests of these birds of the good God that enliven the country-side with their varied plumage and protect us from insects? There are, I well know, unruly boys who, tired of their books and lessons, delight to play truant and make a pastime of climbing trees and searching hedges in order to toss the new-born birds out of their nests to a miserable death and to smash the eggs. The rural guard is on the watch for these wicked thieves, and the law punishes them, that our fields and orchards may enjoy the birds’ protection and continue to produce their sheaves and their fruit.” CHAPTER XXXIII GRANIVOROUS BIRDS “It might at first seem that I ought to be as lenient toward those who hunt granivorous birds as I have just shown myself severe toward the destroyers of insectivorous birds; for can it be denied that birds given to a vegetable diet are harmful to our crops, that they plunder our grain-fields and devour great quantities of seeds, buds, fruit, and young garden plants? Some of them know how to extract the wheat grains from the ear, and others boldly come to get their share of the oats thrown to the poultry in our barnyards. Others, again, prefer the juicy flesh of fruit and know before we do when cherries are ripe or pears are mellow, so that when we come to gather in the harvest all that we find is merely what they have left. There are even some that have a queer-shaped beak for splitting fruit open and dividing it into quarters so as to get at the pips, which are to them the very choicest of titbits. Look at this one’s beak and tell me if you have ever seen a more singular tool.” “The two mandibles cross each other,” said Jules. “Instead of meeting they go criss-cross like the blades of an old pair of scissors out of order.”