Birds of the Cambridge region. 255 



greens, but since the English Sparrows became numerous the Purple Finches 

 have abandoned one favorite urban haunt after another, and, excepting at their 

 seasons of migration, I seldom see or hear them now in the older settled parts 

 of Cambridge. Throughout the Arlington-Belmont-Waltham region, they still 

 breed commonly enough, especially in hilly pastures sprinkled with Virginia juni- 

 pers among the dense foliage of which they love to conceal their nests. They 

 also eat the berries (or rather the seeds contained in the berries) of this juniper, 

 and when the trees fruit generously the birds often resort to them through the 

 entire autumn and winter. At the latter season they occur somewhat irregularly 

 and usually only sparingly, but I have known them to be present in immense 

 numbers, and continuously, from December to March. This was the case during 

 the winter of 1883 -1884, when flocks containing upwards of fifty, or even as 

 many as seventy-five to one hundred, Purple Finches each, were repeatedly met 

 with in Belmont and Waverley. On January 1 7 of that winter I saw fully two 

 hundred birds along the roadsides while driving from Belmont to Cambridge. 



The juniper woods which once covered so much of the country lying 

 between Mount Auburn and the Watertown Arsenal, used to attract Purple 

 Finches at all seasons, and the birds bred there so commonly at times that on 

 June 6, 1869, I found no less than six nests containing eggs or young within 

 a space of half an acre. Mr. H. W. Henshaw tells me that the Purple Finch 

 nested almost if not quite as numerously, at a somewhat earlier period, in a tract 

 of Virginia junipers that formerly existed near the western end of Brookline 

 Street, Cambridgeport. This has been already mentioned on page 27 of the 

 Introduction of the present Memoir. 



[Passer domesticus (Linn.). House Sparrow. English Sparrow. House Sparrows 

 became permanently established in Boston in 1869, and generally and abundantly distributed 

 throughout Cambridge and the neighboring towns only about ten years later. At the present 

 time there is probably no part of the Cambridge Region which they do not occasionally visit, but 

 they are seldom seen at any season in extensive tracts of woodland and, as a rule, they breed 

 only locally and somewhat sparingly in the more thinly settled farming districts, from which 

 most of them remove into the towns at the near approach of winter, returning with the first 

 opening of spring. There are outlying poultry farms, however, which they frequent at all times 

 of the year, and in the Fresh Pond Swamps they assemble in immense numbers during Decem- 

 ber, January and February, to feed on the grain scattered along the railroad embankments by 

 passing freight cars. The birds which inhabit the towns subsist chiefly on undigested oats 

 obtained from horse droppings and on fragments of bread thrown out for them or for the gray 

 squirrels. In average seasons such sources of supply, eked out by seeds and berries of various 

 kinds, suffice to feed the hungry hordes, but during heavy and long-continued snowstorms, 

 especially those accompanied or closely followed by low temperatures, the Sparrows sometimes 

 perish by thousands, of cold and starvation. This has repeatedly happened within the past ten 

 years. I have known dozens of dead or dying birds to be found in the course of a single 

 morning, scattered about on the snow under vine-clad walls or along the city streets. After a 



