It is really a wonderful performance. There are very few kinds of birds that do anything like it. Of itself it is enough to make the song sparrow famous, and it is well worth any one’s while to hear it and see it done. Nobody can see it without believing that birds have a true appreciation of music. They are better off than some human beings, at all events. They know one tune from another.
A lady correspondent was good enough to send me, not long ago, a pleasing account of the doings of a pair of song sparrows, which, as she says, came to her for six seasons.
“One year,” she writes, “they happened to build where I could watch them from the window, and they did a very curious thing. They fed the little birds with all sorts of worms of different colors until they were ready to leave the nest; then the male brought a pure white moth and held it near the nest, which was in some stems of a rosebush a few inches from the ground, on a level with the lower rail of a picket fence.
“One of the little birds came out of the nest at once and followed its parent, who went sidewise, always holding the dazzling white morsel just out of the youngster’s reach. In this manner they crossed the lane, climbed the inclined plane of a woodpile, and passed through a fence and across a vegetable garden into an asparagus bed, in which miniature forest the little traveler received and ate the moth.
“Another nest was built on the bank of a brook on the farther side of a road. Out of this nest I saw two little fellows coaxed with these snow-white moths, and led across the dusty road into a hedge.”
One or two experiences of this kind are sufficient reward for a good deal of patient observation. The singer of this pair of birds, my correspondent says, had ten distinct songs, one of them exceedingly beautiful and peculiar.
The song sparrow’s nest is usually built on the ground, and the bird is one of several kinds that are known indiscriminately by country people as ground sparrows.
Song sparrows seem to be of a pretty nervous disposition, to judge from their behavior. One of their noticeable characteristics is a twitching, up-and-down, “pumping” motion of the tail, as they dash into cover on being disturbed.
People who live in the Southern States see these birds only in the cooler part of the year, but must have abundant opportunity to hear them sing as spring approaches.