DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WESTERN AND EASTERN BIRDS. 633 
domestic in the early days of his coming, and hovers about the 
house and garden, tame and familiar, a willing dependent upon your 
bounty, picking up the crumbs about the door-steps, and repaying 
you a thousand fold, every morning and evening; and, having 
taken up his abode with you, he likes it well enough to stay all 
spring, summer, and fall, always the same, cheerful, familiar and 
musical. 
Very different, indeed, is the song sparrow of the transmissis- 
sippistates. In March, the ornithologist who rambles over the prai- 
ries and along the wooded water-courses of southern Iowa, notices 
a small, brown bird, flitting among the hazel copses, shy, restless 
and timid, eluding his observation so carefully, that, if he is una- 
ware of its nature, he will frequently be obliged to shoot it before 
he can identify it. Then to his surprise, he finds it to be the song 
sparrow. For a few weeks, he meets in his daily walks, the same 
shy apparition, though never very frequently, until in April it dis- 
appears. Perhaps, once or twice, on an unusually lovely morning, 
he may catch the familiar song that used to delight him in early 
March amid the hills of New England; but to hear it even once 
he must be very fortunate. During summer he may rarely meet 
the bird in the thickets on the edge of the timber, or even catch 
him, towards the approach of autumn, reconnoitring in some gar- 
den ; but only rarely, — until in September and October, they come 
back again in greatly increased numbers, more tame and familiar 
than in the spring, and now he begins to recognize some resem- 
blance to the song sparrow of the Eastern States. 
Where have they been all summer? In Minnesota—the greater 
part of them at least. The brush prairies, the thicket in the river 
valleys; and the shrubbery that surrounds the lakes of western 
and central Minnesota, are the summer resort of the song sparrow. 
Here, hundreds build their nests and raise their young, — shy anc 
timid as ever, but no longer silent. The ornithologist just from 
the east, is astonished to find in the song sparrow, the wildness 
that marks the meadow-lark and flicker, in New York or Massa- 
chusetts, although the notes and habits are otherwise precisely 
similar. 
Yet it takes only a short time for the song sparrow to find out 
that he has nothing to fear from men, but that on the contrary, it 
is safer and pleasanter to live in their company than without it. 
When a region has been settled for a few years, small birds of all 
