For Young Observers
Boys and girls who study birds are invited to send short accounts of their observations to this department.
Our Doorstep Sparrow
Don’t think that I mean the House, or English Sparrow, for he is quite a different bird. Our little doorstep friend is the very smallest of all the brown Sparrows you know, and wears a reddish brown cap, and a gray vest so plain it hasn’t a single button or stripe on it. He is a dear, plump little bird, who sits in the sun and throws up his head and chippers away so happily that people call him the Chipping Sparrow.
He comes to the doorstep and looks up at you as if he knew you wanted to feed him, and if you scatter crumbs on the piazza he will pick them up and hop about on the floor as if it were his piazza as well as yours.
One small Chippy, whom his friends called Dick, used to light on the finger of the kind man who fed him. and use his hand for dining-room, and sometimes when he had had a very nice breakfast, he would hop up on a finger, perch, and sing a happy song!
Dick was so sure his friends were kind and good, that as soon as his little birds were out of the nest, he brought them to be fed too. They did not know what a nice dining-room a hand makes, so they wouldn’t fly up to it, but when the gentleman held their bread and seeds close to the ground, they would come and help themselves.
CHIPPY’S NEST.
If you were a bird and were going to build a nest, where would you put it? At the end of a row of your brothers’ nests, as the Eave Swallows do? Or would that be too much like living in a row of brick houses in the city? Chipping Sparrows don’t like to live too close to their next door neighbors. They don’t mind if a Robin is in the same tree, on another bough, but they want their own branch all to themselves.
And they want it to be a branch, too. Other birds may build their nests on the ground, or burrow in the ground, or dig holes in
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