INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS.
“ I am poorly situated; there are no birds in my vicinity except Robins and Wrens,” you say. Nonsense! it is impossible. You make me feel as Dean Hole, the genial ecclesiastical rose-grower did when certain lazy amateur gardeners,after admiring his rose garden, said that they could not grow roses because their soil was unsuitable, exclaiming, “ Oh, what a garden yours is for roses! Old Mr. Drone, our gardener, tells us he never saw such soil as yours nor so bad a soil as ours for roses.” And the Dean dryly exclaimed, “ Herein lies a fact in horticulture,—Mr. Drone always has a bad soil.”
Get the best possible results from your limited area, and if it is anything better than a back yard, you need not be discouraged. The difficulty with us Americans is that we are accustomed to a limitless extent of country, and scramble carelessly over it, in our amateur scientific investigations, as well as in other ways, instead of thoroughly studying home first. If the English naturalists ranged as wildly as we do, they would exhaust the island, and fall off the edge in a month. White, of Selborne, has left us a book that is classic, from his knowledge of one county, and our Thoreau has given us the perfect literature of wood-craft from his intimate knowledge of a comparatively small area.
The first nest that you will probably find, and one that will confront you at every turn, will be the Robin's. Common,rough in structure, and anything but pretty, it is a type nevertheless; being partly made of sticks and lined with clay, it is a combination of carpentry and masonry. The Wood Thrush also uses mud in a similar manner, but builds more neatly. Sparrows you will find lodged everywhere,—in the hedge, under bushes, by thick grass tufts,—their individual nests being so much alike that it is difficult to distinguish them apart. Dried grass and fine roots are the chief materials used by them, with the exception of the little Chipping Sparrow, who combines horsehair and pine-needles with the grasses, which, together with its delicacy and small size, identify the nest.
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