to the fields and hedges, where the sloe bush in April furnishes them with food. May brings other dainties, and the labors and business of incubation withdraw them from our observation. The idea that has been occasionally entertained, that this bird selects only such buds as contain the embryo of an insect, to feed on it, and thus free us of a latent colony of caterpillars, is certainly not correct. It may confer this benefit accidentally, but not with intention. The mischief effected by bull-finches is greater than commonly imagined, and the ground beneath the bush or tree, on which they have been feeding, is commonly strewed with the shattered buds, the rejectments of their banquet; and we are thus deprived of a large portion of our best fruits by this assiduous pillager, this “pick-a- bud,” as the gardeners call it, without any redeeming virtues to compensate our loss. A snowy, severe winter makes great havoc with this bird. It feeds much in this season upon the fruit of the dog-rose, “hips,” as we call them. When they are gone, it seems to pine for food, and is starved, or perhaps frozen on its roost, as few are observed to survive a long inclement winter. But it is not the buds of our fruit- bearing trees only that these destructive birds seek out; yet in all instances I think it will be observed that such buds as produce leaves only are rejected, and those which contain the embryo of the future blossom selected: by this procedure, though the tree is prevented from producing fruit, yet the foliage is expanded as usual; but had the leaves, the lungs of the plant, been indiscriminately consumed, the tree would probably have died, or its summer growth been materially injured: we may thus lose our fruit this year, yet the tree survives, and hope lives, too, that we may be more fortunate the next. The Tartarian honeysuckle (lonicera Tart.) and corchorus Japonicus, when growing in the shrubbery, are very commonly stripped of their bloom by bull- finches: the first incloses many separated blossoms in its calyx before expansion, and in that particular is analogous to the buds of icosandrious trees in the garden; and the full-petalled swelling bloom of the latter affords a fine treat for their feasts; but we may permit these pretty birds to banquet here, though, if we expect a supply of summer fruit, we must unsparingly drive them away from the branches of our frugiferous trees. The blossoms of the peach, nectarine, and almond, I have never observed to be injured by these birds: the sparrow will pick away the buds of trees against walls when they frequent such places, but, with this exception, I know none but the bull-finch which resort to that food as a regular supply.