i6 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



to sing his liquid, melodious welcome. Like the 

 chipping-sparrow, the song-sparrow eats more large- 

 ly of weed seeds than of insects — in fact, three- 

 fourths of his diet is weed seeds. 



Just now, as I write [I find this entry in my journal for one 

 early September], there is a whole flock of song-sparrows in 

 the neighborhood — twenty or more, I should say — and this 

 morning they were all in my Early Rose potato-patch. The 

 vines have pretty well died down, and the weeds, especially 

 the grasses, which escaped the cultivator by growing amid 

 the hills, are standing up in plain sight and beginning to drop 

 their seeds. As I passed the bed all the sparrows rose with a 

 whirl (I had not seen them, and their flight startled me), but 

 instantly settled down out of sight again when I had gone on a 

 few steps, in and under the weeds. Two hours later, when I 

 once more passed by, they were still at it. No one, of course, 

 can calculate the number of seeds those birds ate, but it was in 

 the thousands, certainly, and next year's cultivating will be 

 by so much the easier, next year's crop so much the more suc- 

 cessful, for a given amount of labor. 



Among other birds which nested* on the place were 

 downy woodpeckers, flickers, king-birds, phcebes, 

 ruby-throated humming-birds, screech-owls, orioles, 

 flycatchers, and swallows, all of them without ar- 

 tificial boxes. Of course, the bluebirds, owls, and 

 woodpeckers would need boxes on a place where 

 there were no trees with rotten limbs or holes, but 

 our orchard was an old one and had several ideal 

 trees from the bird standpoint, if not from that of 

 the orchardist. We also had an old hickory, once 

 struck by lightning and now sawed off twenty feet 

 from the ground, with a tin cap nailed over the stub. 

 Under this cap both owls and nickers have nested. 



