OUR WINTER BIRDS. 127 
ingly melodious if not a very versatile singer, in England is 
often kept in cages and mated with the canary, and might 
be here. There would be no difficulty in catching him. 
Two other of the familiar friends who make our spring 
meadows vocal with an incessant concert, the song-sparrow 
and grass-finch, remain with us through the winter also; 
but more than half the song-sparrows are frightened south- 
ward by the first snow-storm. A few, however, are always 
to be met with in the swamps and edges of the woods dur- 
ing January, living under cover of the briers and brush- 
heaps, and upon the seeds of various grasses and herbs, 
scratching up the leaves to get at dormant insects or their 
egos, here picking up a checker-berry which the snow has 
not drifted over, there nibbling at the dried remains of 
blackberries, raspberries, and wrinkled crab-apples, squeez- 
ing the gum from a swelling bud, tearing open the seed- 
case of the wild-rose whose blossom they shook to pieces 
as they darted to their nests in early June. The brown 
easily recognized by the two white feathers 
erass-finch 
shown in the tail when flying—seems scarcely ever to leave 
the field in which it was born. It is emphatically a bird of 
the meadows, where its song is heard loudest in the long 
summer twilights when most other birds are silent, so that 
Wilson Flagg called it the vesper sparrow. Building its 
