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 

 eggs, 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 

 grass-finch easily recognized by the two white feathers 

 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 



