112 British Birds, 



HOUSE SPAKROW— (P^j^^r domesticus). 

 Sparrow, Common Sparrow. — He may well be called 

 the Common Sparrow, for we find him alike in the 

 town and the country, in the field and in the garden, 

 by the road-side hovel or in the neighbourhood of the 

 great mansion. And whether he be sooty and black 

 with the smoke of mid-London, or with his colours 

 pure and unsmirched and bright as in the clear breezy 

 village, he is still always the same pert, forward crea- 

 ture, whose name has passed almost into a proverb 

 for bold familiarity. Ubiquitous as he is by habit 

 and system, his nest is found in sites almost as various 

 and as numerous as the places of his residence. 

 Under the tiles or eaves of buildings, in the thatch- 

 edges of a barn, in holes in the interior of a thatch- 

 roof, in water-pipes and receivers for eaves-gutters, in 

 holes in walls or old buildings, in ivy clothing either 

 a wall or a tree, in fir trees, in wall-trees, especially if 

 large and high, below Rooks' nests, in deserted nests 

 of large birds, — frequent in all these sites, it seems 

 difficult to say where it may not be found. Often, 

 too, it becomes a mass of straw and dry grass and 

 lavish feather-lining, big enough to fill a man's hat of 

 large size. The eggs are very various in the intensity 

 of their surface markings. They are white, speckled 

 and spotted and streaked with ash colour and dusky 

 brown, some so slightly as to be pale grey, others so 

 profusely as to be very dark "pepper and salt." 

 They vary in number from four to six. Whenever 

 the nest is built in a situation naturally open at top, 

 it is domed over by the little constructor, — Fig. 7, 

 plate IV. 



