Scarecrow isn't a word you hear often used today, except perhaps to describe one of your children for wearing awful clothes. Nowadays, birds are not usually scared off crops by a few tattery rags stretched over crossed sticks. The job is often done by a mechanically controlled gunshot sound at intervals. But there was a time, in England certainly, according to an article by Ann Priest in the current August-September issue of The Countryman, when children stayed in the fields all day and every day until the particular crop was safe, using various simple devices to keep the birds away. One was a rattle, another was to beat on a bucket with a thick stick, and there was a crude clapper. Farmers paid children only a penny or two a day, but in hard times the money was welcome. The job started at daybreak and ended only when all birds had gone to roost. And the child was expected to keep moving all the time. The writer of the article quotes from a book, The Folklore of Warwickshire, where one Joseph Ashby is recorded as saying that he would comfort himself by shouting "So as to hear a human voice". Also: You couldn't cry while you shouted. For the children were to stay out in all weathers. A report to Agricultural Employment Commissioners 1867-69 contains a year-long list of children's jobs. The most prolific was bird-scaring: "March: potato setting, bird scaring, clearing land for spring corn. (Remember these were jobs for children.) April: Bird-scaring, weeding corn, setting potatoes. May: bird-scaring, weeding corn, cleaning land for turnips etc. July: scaring birds from the ripening corn, turnip singling, pea picking, cutting thistles. November: Bird scaring from new sown wheat and beans, acorning. December: scaring birds from corn stacks, stone picking, coppice work."
The article notes that even when children kept up a good volume of noise, it would at times be necessary for a man with a gun to go around, potting, presumably at over-confident birds. Various types of mechanical scaring devices were worked on, but as well as the human scaring, the traditional figure made up of a few poles with an old coat and hat on top lasted a long time. In recent times, the article says, there came a mechanical hawk, which swooped at intervals along a wire, and a scarecrow with moving arms and head. A bit of the old with the new.