THE CHAFFINCH. 
a host of others. Bechstein informs ns that in Thuringia, 
especially in a knife-making village called “ Buhl,” the inhabi- 
tants are such great chaffinch fanciers, that they will go sixteen 
miles to catch a bird, and that no sooner is the voice of a 
wild chaffinch heard, than the bird-catchers of the neighbour- 
hood turn out as one man, and return not till they have effected 
his capture. “ This chaffinch is worth a cow,” is a frequent 
proverb at Buhl, and originated in the fact of a poor inhabitant 
of that place having bartered his only cow for a genuine 
“ Bitcherzoog.” 
Says Waterton, ‘‘Amongst all the pretty warblers that flit 
from bush to bush before me as I wander through the 
flowery fields, next to the 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 consumes, 
which otherwise would be carried by the wind into your choicest 
quarter 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 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 probably 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 conveyed it to its nest, and interwove it with the lichen 
on the outside of it. # # * * The thorn, and most of the 
evergreen shrubs, the sprouts on the boles of forest trees, the 
woodbine, the whin, the wild rose, and occasionally the bramble, 
are this bird’s favourite places for nidification. Like all its 
congeners, it never covers its eggs on retiring from the nest, for 
its young are hatched blind. 
“ There is something particularly pleasing to me in the song 
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