HOUSE SPARROW 
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haunts and homes, has caused its name to be almost 
universally execrated ; but it is none the less a 
bird of extremely interesting habits, from its extra- 
ordinary faculty of making itself at home almost 
anywhere, and the bird world would be a great 
deal the poorer by its absence. Its faculty of 
thriving in close proximity to man is one great 
secret of the Sparrow's success in life, and in spite 
of its enormous abundance, it is never found far 
away from gardens or village streets, or the grain- 
fields and corn-stacks upon the farms. The variety 
of places in which it nests is very great ; where it 
is particularly numerous and insuppressible it builds 
a large, untidy nest of hay among the branches of 
trees, but the typical and characteristic site is in 
some sort of a hole, either in trees or buildings, 
or in thick creepers and ivy which supply it with 
sheltered nesting-cavities of a similar kind. Dry 
grass and root-tufts, with a lining of feathers, form 
the Sparrow's natural nesting material, but the 
nests are often a perfect museum of household 
odds and ends, and a whole year's collection of 
such rubbish as bits of thread and string, snippets 
of cloth and flannel, fragments of door-mats, 
curtains, and carpets, and pieces of torn letters and 
old newspapers may often be disentangled shred 
by shred from a Sparrow's nest of no more than 
moderate size. The bird has a particularly repro- 
