THE NESTS OF DIFFERENT BIRDS. 
122 
of their first erection, and with the same precautions 
against severe weather, when all necessity for such 
provision has ceased, and the usual temperature of the 
season rather requiring coolness and a free circulation 
of air. The house-sparrow will commonly build four 
or five times in the year, and in a variety of situations, 
under the warm eaves of our houses and our sheds, the 
branch of the clustered fir, or the thick tall hedge that 
bounds our garden, &c. ; in all which places, and with- 
out the least consideration of site or season, it will col- 
lect a great mass of straws and hay, and gather a pro- 
fusion of feathers from the poultry-yard to line its nest. 
This cradle for its young, whether under our tiles in 
March or in July, when the parent bird is panting in 
the common heat of the atmosphere, has the same pro- 
vision made to afford warmth to the brood ; yet this is 
a bird that is little affected by any of the extremes of 
our climate. The wood-pigeon and the jay, though 
they erect their fabrics on the tall underwood in the 
open air, will construct them so slightly, and with such 
a scanty provision of materials, that they seem scarcely 
adequate to support their broods, and even their eggs 
may almost be seen through the loosely connected 
materials : but the goldfinch, that inimitable spinner, 
the Arachne of the grove, forms its cradle of fine 
mosses and lichens, collected from the apple or the 
pear tree, compact as a felt, lining it with the down of 
thistles besides, till it is as warm as any texture of the 
kind can be, and it becomes a model for beautiful con- 
struction. The golden-crested wren, a minute creature, 
perfectly unmindful of any severity in our winter, and 
which hatches its young in June, the warmer portion 
of our year, yet builds its most beautiful nest with the 
utmost attention to warmth; and, interweaving small 
branches of moss with the web of the spider, forms a 
closely compacted texture nearly an inch in thickness, 
lining it with such a profusion of feathers, that, sinking 
deep into this downy accumulation, it seems almost lost 
itself when sitting, and the young, when hatched, ap- 
pear stifled with the warmth of their bedding and the 
heat of their apartment; while the whitethroat, the 
