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Updated: April 30, 2025
The chaffinches, too the greatest bird multitude there is, perhaps, after the house-sparrows are free enough to sing. They have been, during the past week, sailing out on short voyages from the tops of trees, like flycatchers, dancing in the air after their victims and then returning to the spray.
A curiously mixed group assembles on the lawn each morning at eight o'clock in the winter. First of all there are the pheasants crowing loudly for their breakfast, then come the stately swans, several pinioned wild ducks, tame pigeons and wild and timid stock doves, four or five moorhens, any number of daws, as well as thrushes, blackbirds, starlings, house-sparrows, and finches.
While one nursed the sick, the other made clothes for the well; and thus they were always chippering and chatting to each other, like a pair of antiquated house-sparrows, retailing over harmless gossips, and moralizing in that gentle jogtrot which befits serious old women.
Marius approached as near as he could, pretending to be busy reading a book, but he halted afar off, then returned and seated himself on his bench, where he spent four hours in watching the house-sparrows who were skipping about the walk, and who produced on him the impression that they were making sport of him. A fortnight passed thus.
I believe the older and stronger birds secure the fixed and best sites, driving the younger birds to the trees, and that the art of building nests in trees is dying out among house-sparrows. He declares that instinct is not due to organisation so much as organisation to instinct. The fact is, that neither can claim precedence of or pre-eminence over the other.
The first mild day in May the window was opened for them. The female flew first to a tree in front of the house, where she was greeted in the rudest manner by the bird-tramps which infest our streets, the house-sparrows. They began to assemble around her, no doubt prepared for attack, when she gave a loud cry of distress, and out flew her valiant knight to her aid.
And finally, I should be doing an injustice to the much-calumniated house-sparrows if I did not mention how faithfully each of them shares any food it discovers with all members of the society to which it belongs. The more, one is pleased to find this observation of old confirmed in a recent little book by Mr.
No. 2, p. 11. Brehm, iv. 567. As to the house-sparrows, a New Zealand observer, Mr. T.W. Kirk, described as follows the attack of these "impudent" birds upon an "unfortunate" hawk. "He heard one day a most unusual noise, as though all the small birds of the country had joined in one grand quarrel. They kept dashing at him in scores, and from all points at once.
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