A CHANGE OF DIET 233 



more than about a month. Partridges begin to prefer grain 

 about the same time as sparrows, but they excel the sparrow 

 in adaptability. When the grain is gone they take to an 

 exclusive diet of green stuff, so that one could tell tolerably 

 closely from the contents of a crop what was the date of the 

 year. 



The country as such is not popular with sparrows. In 

 thinly populated grass country you may search some while 

 before finding a sparrow. They are, for example, singularly 

 scarce in the Isle of Wight at a short distance from the 

 towns. In any country place the numbers will be in close 

 proportion with the nearness to houses and stackyards. If 

 you walk along a hedgerow between two fields you will find 

 bullfinches, blackbirds, thrushes, and in summer the warblers, 

 a hundred times more numerous than sparrows. Indeed, 

 you will probably have trouble to find a single sparrow or a 

 sparrow's nest, old or young. In spite of its lustiness the 

 bird seems absolutely to depend on man. Its food is on the 

 road, or by the house, or in the stackyard. Fortified by the 

 grain and bread that it finds there in quantity, it is master of 

 almost all birds that are. 



Within the stackyards it has one almost invariable com- 

 panion, the greenfinch, a bird as lusty, and if anything more 

 voracious. The bird is probably one of the three or four 

 most numerous in England. All those who have looked for 

 birds' nests in east and middle England will have felt from 

 time to time a growing irritation at the quantity of greenfinch 

 nests. The rather untidy basins of moss and bents, with the 

 rather dull eggs, are as obvious and many as blackbirds' and 

 thrushes' nests in an earlier month. The bird is bolder in 

 some ways than the sparrow. The writer has more than 

 once fed the old bird while sitting on the nest. They will 



not dream of leaving the nest though a group of people 



(u«o 30 



