those birds become gregarious, and move in varying flocks to their feeding-grounds, at more than the usual elevation.
The song of tills species is too monotonous and shrill to afford gratification. Its position, as a member of the great Oscine group of Aves, has doubtless been given, not from any special development of musical ability, but from the presence of a singing apparatus. According to Macgillivray, its ordinary call is expressed by the dissyllabic word phillip or yellop.
Although its ordinary food consists of grain and insects, which are mainly procurable in the open country, yet it readily accommodates itself to a town life, and derives a subsistence from the refuse that is thrown out of houses. Its appetite is so accommodating that there is hardly any article of human diet which this bird will refuse. Fragments of potatoes, the refuse of a greengrocer's shop, a dry crust of bread, and a discarded bone, are equally attractive. "The market-places," according to Rev. J. G. Wood, "especially in those where vegetables are sold, as Covent Garden and Farringdon Market, the sparrow appears in great force, and in no way daunted by the multitudes of busy human beings that traverse the locality, flutters about their very feet, and feeds away without displaying the least alarm."
"In the Zoological Gardens, and in all large avaries," says the same distinguished writer, "the sparrow is quite in its element, pushing its way through the meshes of the wire roofs and fronts, pecking at the food supplied to the birds within, and retreating through the wires if attacked by the rightful owners of the plundered food. Even the majestic eagle is not free from the depredations of the sparrow, who hops through the bars of the cage
