176 FRIENDS WORTH KNOWING. 



ually disappear, he gives himself up more and more to a 

 strictly graminivorous diet, breaking open the seed-vessels 

 stored up by the wilderness of weeds growing in every 

 field which the farmer has let " run to waste " for himself, 

 but only thus cultivated the more for the sparrows. There 

 is always enough of this material, either in the unbroken 

 pods or fallen to the ground, to last through the winter 

 such adventurous birds as brave our snows, screening them- 

 selves from the chilling blast in recesses of the dense thick- 

 ets, or taking shelter under piles of logs and brush. 



During the latter part of April, in ordinary seasons, the 

 song-sparrow finds himself married, and he and his wife be- 

 gin to construct their home. The site chosen is the green 

 bank of some meadow brook, a tussock beside a country 

 road, a hollow under some decaying log, where the nest 

 shall be well secreted in a little thicket of grasses and flow- 

 ers, or, in many cases, on bushes, vines, or even, as Mr. J. 

 S. Howland assures me, in an old broken woodpecker's hole 

 in an apple-tree. A friend in Astoria, Long Island, on 

 May 8th, 1877, found a pair of these sparrows snugly en- 

 sconced in an ivy growing along the inner wall of a green- 

 house. The birds had evidently watched their opportuni- 

 ty when the door was open or the glass raised during the 

 warm days, and constructed their nest and deposited three 



