THE CHAFFINCH. 337 



no brood. The gander seems to have been aware that something 

 was going on wrong in his establishment, for this spring the old 

 gentleman has taken care to introduce an extra female. Were Ovid, 

 that excellent ornithologist, now on earth, he would tell us that this 

 he-goose, dissatisfied with our law of monogamy, has been as far as 

 Constantinople, to buy a license for a plurality of wives. 



Amongst all the pretty warblers which flit from 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 house top, 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 ol 

 his continual services at your barn door, where he lives throughout the 

 winter, chiefly on the unprofitable seeds, which would cause you end- 

 less 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 on a 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 out- 

 side of it. Four or five eggs are the usual number which the chaf- 

 finch's nest contains ; and sometimes only three. The thorn, and 

 most of the evergreen shrubs, the sprouts on the boles of forest trees, 

 the woodbine, the whin, the wild rose, and occasionally the bramble, 

 are this bird's favourite places for nidification. Like all its congeners, 

 it never covers its eggs on retiring from the nest, for its young are 

 hatched blind. 



Y 



