26 MY NATURE NOTEBOOK. 



commissariat. They are familiar with the taste of 

 every edible which man manufactures or cultivates ; 

 and in hard weather they only crowd round a little 

 closer and pilfer more audaciously. So there is 

 excuse for man if he fails to see why he should put 

 out food for a " lot of sparrows." Fortunately, the 

 sparrows' experiences, through ages of thieving and 

 human attempts at retaliation, have endowed them 

 with an instinctive dread of everything which bears 

 the semblance of a trap. String they especially 

 abhor. So, by suspending the food, or a board on 

 which it is placed, by strings, or even by merely 

 stretching strings a few inches above the ground 

 round a " bird-table " on the lawn, you may have the 

 pleasure of seeing, in almost every garden, however 

 small, blackbirds, thrushes, starlings, robins, hedge- 

 sparrows (a slender-billed bird, totally unlike the 

 house-sparrow in everything except size, name, and 

 colour), robins, and tits assembling daily for a break- 

 fast which the sparrows dare not devour. Even the 

 chaffinches and greenfinches dread the string far less 

 than the house-sparrows, which hop around watching 

 the bolder birds risking their lives so the sparrows 

 think under the deadly string. They get some 

 scraps of the food which the others pull out of the 

 zone of supposed danger, and one or two daring 

 spirits will, after a time, learn to take it for them- 

 selves ; but no one would grudge them this. What 

 one objects to is that, so soon as unprotected food 

 has been put out and a robin has been seen to eat 

 without an explosion or the snap of a hidden trap 

 occurring, the sparrows should assemble in a jostling 

 mob and gobble everything up. 



