280 THE CHAFFINCH. 
bush to bush before me, as I wander through the 
flowery fields, next to poor cock robin, the chaffinch 
is my favourite bird. I see him almost at every 
step. He is in the fruit and forest trees, and in the 
lowly hawthorn: he is on the housetop, and on the 
ground close to your feet. You may observe him 
on the stack-bar, and on the dunghill; on the king’s 
highway, in the fallow field, in the meadow, in the 
pasture, and by the margin of the stream. 
If his little pilferings on the beds of early radishes 
alarm you for the return of the kitchen garden, 
think, I pray you, how many thousands of seeds he 
consumes, which otherwise would be carried by the 
wind into your choicest quarters of cultivation, and 
would spring up there, most sadly to your cost. 
Think again of his continual services. at your barn 
door, where he lives throughout the winter, chiefly 
on the unprofitable seeds, which would cause you 
endless trouble were they allowed to lie in the straw, 
and to be carried out with it into the land, on the 
approach of spring. 
His nest is a paragon of perfection. He attaches 
lichen to the outside of it, by means of the spider’s 
slender web. In the year 1805, when I was ona 
plantation in Guiana, I saw the humming bird 
making use of the spider’s web in its nidification ; 
and then the thought struck me that our chaffinch 
might probably make use of it too. On my return 
to Europe, I watched a chaffinch busy at its nest : 
it left it, and flew to an old wall, took a cobweb from 
it, then conveyed it to its nest, and interwove it 
with the lichen on the outside of it. Four or five 
