280 
THE CHAFFINCH. 
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 housetop, 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 con- 
sumes, 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 of his continual services at your barn door, 
where he lives throughout the winter, chiefly on the 
unprofitable seeds, which would cause you endless 
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 pro- 
bably 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 con- 
veyed it to its nest, and interwove it with the lichen 
on the outside of it. Four or five eggs are the 
