Sparrow

“ One evening we notice the juncos and tree sparrows in the tangled, frost-burned stubble, and the next day, although our eye catches glints of white from sparrow tails, it is from vesper finches, not from juncos, and the weed spray which a few hours before bent beneath a white-throat’s weight, now vibrates with the energy which a field sparrow puts into his song. Field and chipping sparrows, which now come in numbers, are somewhat alike, but by their beaks and songs you may know them. ”

“ The sparrows are all meek and lowly birds. They are of the grass, the fences, the low bushes, the weedy wayside places. Nature has denied them all brilliant tints, but she has given them sweet and musical voices. Theirs are the quaint and simple lullaby songs of childhood. The white-throat has a timid, tremulous strain, that issues from the low bushes or from behind the fence, where its cradle is hid. The song sparrow modulates its simple ditty as softly as the lining of its own nest. The vesper sparrow has only peace and gentleness in its strain. ”

“ Youth, it is true, lays preposterous snares of bricks to entrap him, and sparrow clubs conspire against him; but no sportsman goes out to make a prey of him. Who, indeed, would expend time and patience in fetching a compass about a sparrow, or sit a summer’s day with net and line, decoy-bird and call, with a sparrow before his mind as his reward? ”

“ Well, the instant the lost sparrow opens his little beak and gives a cry of distress, three or four mother sparrows come flying toward him with their beaks full of food. They don’t wait to see whose baby he is, as some human mothers would wait. ”

“ Not handsome in form, certainly not elegant, nor well proportioned—with his short squat body and stump of a tail, thick neck, large head, and immense bill, little feet, that seem meant for a Sparrow, and eyes which, although bright and sharp enough, are much too small for the head. But he is a swift flier, for all that he looks so awkward; and see! quick as light he darts down upon that heedless fish that has come too near the surface, swallows it at a gulp, and is ready for another dart before you can look round you. ”

“ Among the least conspicuous birds, sparrows are the easiest to classify for that very reason, and certain prominent features of the half dozen commonest of the tribe make their identification simple even to the merest novice. The distinguishing marks of this sparrow that haunts open, breezy pasture lands and country waysides are its bright, reddish-brown wing coverts, prominent among its dingy, pale brownish-gray feathers, and its white tail-quills, shown as the bird flies along the road ahead of you to light upon the fence-rail. ”

“ At a certain hour in the Tuilleries Gardens, you may see a man perfectly surrounded with a crowd of sparrows—some perching on his shoulder; some fluttering in the air immediately before his face; some on the ground like a tribe of followers; and others on the marble seats. He jerks a crumb of bread into the air—a sparrow dexterously seizes it as he would a flying insect; he puts a crumb between his lips—a sparrow takes it out and feeds from his mouth. Meantime they keep up a constant chirping; those that are satisfied still stay by and adjust their feathers. ”

“ A little sparrow, however, hops into view, alighting on the slenderest twigs, and seemingly delighting in the swinging and heaving motion which his slight substance communicates to them; but he is not the loquacious bird, whose voice still comes, eager and busy, from his hidden whereabout. Insects are fluttering around. ”

“ Look for the savanna sparrow in salt marshes, marshy or upland pastures, never far inland, and if you see a sparrowy bird, unusually white and heavily streaked beneath, and with pale yellow markings about the eye and on the bend of the wing; you may still make several guesses at its identity before the weak, little insect-like trill finally establishes it. Whoever can correctly name every sparrow and warbler on sight is a person to be envied, if, indeed, he exists at all. ”

“ I have never seen a male sparrow trounce any other bird with half the vigor that I have occasionally seen the mother sparrow evince when she caught her male companion by the feathers of his head, hung him over the side of the limb, and vigorously and thoroughly shook him until he desisted from his annoying and possibly insulting attentions. ”

“ All American sparrows wear the characteristic brown streaked plumage of the group, and include the small chestnut-capped chipping sparrow of gardens, the song sparrow, the little active seashore sparrow, and the large handsome fox sparrow. ”

“ But the starling has a sharp bill, and he hits the poor sparrow with it. Sparrow calls him all the hard names he can think of, and summons the whole sparrow community to his assistance against the mean fellow who has come to deprive him of his home. ”

“ In the drier parts of these lowlands, especially where stubby plum bushes and haws abound, our old friend the field sparrow meets us with the same innocent, confiding air that we remember as characteristic of him in the region of Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. He is one of the birds that we can talk about in the indicative mood without “ifs” or apologies; the good that he does in disposing of surplus insect life is not offset by tolls levied on our ripest and juiciest fruit; he never goes over to the enemy to plunder those who trust him. ”

“ The sparrow and the robin will alone hold their ground, will light on the window sill fearlessly, and will, if encouraged, even come into the room through the open window; and the man must be hard of heart indeed who will refuse to give them the little they need to save them from perishing. Fortunately for the sparrow, his flesh is not particularly toothsome, and there is but little of it. ”

“ The tree sparrow, one of our most interesting sparrows, is another bird who does not fear the winter winds and storms. Although he carries the name of tree sparrow, he is most emphatically a bird of the ground, and may be seen during the winter months in almost any remote patch of plowed ground where there are old weed stalks for him to eat. They are especially addicted to old tomato fields and seem to delight in the seeds of this plant. This sparrow looks like a large chippy, our door yard neighbor of the summer months, excepting that he has distinguishing white bars across his wings. ”

“ But the sparrow usually prefers to wait till the snow-drift is gone. I have never found the nest of one till long after the last drift had disappeared from the fields, though a late writer upon New England [64] birds says the sparrow sometimes lays in April, when snow is yet upon the ground.
The sparrow is not a beautiful bird except in our affections and associations, and its eggs are not beautiful as eggs go,—four or five little freckled spheres, that, like the bird itself, blend well with the ground upon which they are placed. ”

“ Although so domestic in his habits, the sparrow takes but little trouble with his nest. It is a ragged collection of odds and ends, and is evidently built on the assumption that his offspring will, like himself, have to be handy and shift for themselves, and that anything like luxury would be thrown away upon them. As a conversationalist the sparrow excels. ”

“ Few mortals are proof against the charm—when once the first half-dozen are conquered. The first three come easy. Most of us know the Crow—and the Robin—and the Bluebird—and—and—the Sparrow—until we discover that there are more than a dozen varieties of Sparrow, and perceive that this common brown bird, hopping so cheerily in and out of the bushes, may be a Song Sparrow or a Chipping Sparrow or a White-Throated or White-Crowned or any one of the dozen—or even the Cocky English Sparrow, despised by ornithologist and tyro alike. ”

“ The sparrow soon discovers that he is favored, and no sooner makes the discovery than he presumes upon it. Selecting prominent corners of public buildings, he stuffs rubbish into the crevices of the friezes, and advertises by long rags which he leaves fluttering and flapping outside that he has built a nest. Secure from cats and assured of man’s patronage, he thrives and multiplies his kind, each generation adding to the general stock of effrontery and presumptuously acquired privileges, until nations turn in wrath upon their oppressors. ”

“ At that he spread out his wings and pushed himself head first out of the nest into space. It seemed very dangerous, but his wings carried him safely through the air.
But the young Sparrow was by no means as joyous and light-hearted as he seemed to be. The words of his parents had aroused all sorts of doubts in his mind. “Mother was really right,” he said to himself. “The Sparrow is not a migratory bird. No one has ever heard of a Sparrow that has flown across the great ocean and gone to foreign lands. ”

“ There is no mistaking this beautiful sparrow. Among a bunch of his noisy English neighbors the rich brown of his feathers is easily seen, and the three white stripes on his head and the white patch on the throat attract your eye at once. In a group of thirty or forty whitethroats that were feeding on my bird seed I noticed also two plump song sparrows. They are brovm, too, but smaller than the whitethroats, and their breasts are streaked with dark-brown stripes, with a spot right in the center. This is the sparrow that makes music for us from very early spring until late in the autumn. ”

“ Make a long and careful study of the sparrows that nest about you. If you live in the country try to drive them away from the bluebird house and the martin-boxes. The author does not advise boys and girls to do any killing, but carefully pulling down a sparrow’s nest with eggs in it—if you are sure it is a sparrow’s nest—is kindness, he believes, to the other, more useful birds. Yet only yesterday, August 17th, he saw a male sparrow bring moth after moth to its young in a hole in one of the timbers of a bridge from which the author was fishing. ”

“ The field sparrow has a more reddish-brown upper back than any of its small relatives; the absence of streaks on its breast and of the white tail quills so conspicuous in the vesper sparrow's flight, sufficiently differentiate the two birds, while the red bill of the field sparrow is a positive mark of identification. ”

“ In a family not distinguished for good looks, the white-throated sparrow is conspicuously handsome, especially after the spring moult. In midwinter the feathers grow dingy and the markings indistinct; but as the season advances, his colors are sure to brighten perceptibly, and before he takes the northward journey in April, any little lady sparrow might feel proud of the [Pg_166] attentions of so fine-looking and sweet-voiced a lover. The black, white, and yellow markings on his head are now clear and beautiful. ”

“ These parts of a Sparrow are bare; they never have any feathers; and the skin on them is hard and horny, as different from soft thin skin as finger-nails. Now look at the beak, and think how many things a Sparrow has to do with it. He has no hands or paws, and so he must pick up everything he eats with his beak. He has no teeth, and so he must bite his food with his beak. He feeds on seeds like a Canary bird; so his beak comes to a sharp point, because seeds are small things to pick up ”

“ It is not that the quadruped has lost her taste for sparrows, or that she has forgotten all her cunning, for now that the shrubs are in leaf, and afford her convenient ambuscade, she may be seen on any sunny morning practising her old wild-life arts in order to circumvent the wily sparrow. ”

“ In the Jardin, and in the walks of the Palais-Royal, the common Sparrow is prodigiously plenty, very tame, fed by ladies and children, killed or missed with blow-guns by mischievous boys. The Mountain Finch passes in scattered numbers over Paris at this season, going northerly, and is caught in nets. ”

“ I have had quite an extensive acquaintance with the English sparrow, both in town and in the country, and I think that this bad boy of the air has a worse name than he deserves. Undoubtedly he is bad; so are all boys, and all birds, and all men and (240) women. We want supervision, correction, restriction—but the sparrow has good points.
Sparrow mothers lead all birds in mothering, as far as my observation goes. Again and again I have put a baby sparrow on the roof. He is a stranger picked up in the street. I do not know what nest he comes from, he does not know, no one knows. ”

“ The Sparrow is too nimble, and the worm is gone before its rightful owner can turn to face the robber.
The Sparrows endure the severest of the winter weather without any apparent inconvenience, appearing as cheerful, contented, and noisy with the thermometer at zero as at any other time. They are quite fearless, especially in New York, running about under the feet of the passers-by with perfect indifference and confidence. In Boston I have noticed their nests in convenient places, a few feet above crowded sidewalks. ”

“ When the migratory birds return every first-class place is filled by a sparrow's nest. Nothing but second choice situations remain, and with these the late comers must be content. When we consider how much the safety of the next generation depends upon the security of the young while helpless in the nest, we appreciate what the English sparrow has gained by staying throughout the year. Often while the season is so inclement that it would seem there is still danger of frost, the sparrow builds her nest. ”