The former take their wives with them, whom they seem to consult and try their best to please, often in vain, for the female sparrow appears to derive a genuine pleasure from house-hunting, and keeps it up as long as possible—till probably the warm weather comes upon them all at once, and they are fain to settle down anywhere.
In the early part of the season the nests are not built very rapidly: about June or July they are often run up in three or even in two days.
The birds seem to have a dreamy kind of happiness in building the first nest, and want their sweetness long drawn out. In fact, it is the honeymoon.
Example: A half-built nest in the wistaria-tree just under a huge cluster of sweet-scented blossom. It is noon, a bright March sun is shining, and up in the tree it is almost as warm as summer. The particular sparrow who owns that half-built nest has only one wife; it is his first season, and hers. They are both young and innocent, not to say ignorant. The foundation of the nest is terribly untidy, exceptionally so. The hen sits about a yard from the nest, with her consequential morsel of a bill in the air, giving her body a little jerk every now and then as if she had the hiccup, and saying “po-eete.” The cock is closer to the nest, busy preening his feathers in the sunshine. Presently he hops into the nest, and has a turn or two round by way of seeing how things are going on. This is a hint to the hen, and excites her to a little more activity, and away she goes to look for a mouthful of building material. She stops on the garden-path to pick up a tiny beetle or two, then hops on to the vegetable beds, shakes up a few bunches of dry couch-grass roots, but finally abandons them for a terribly long and terribly strong wheaten straw. Back to the wistaria-tree she flies with this, half frightened at her own temerity in carrying anything so large. She sticks it up at the side of the nest—it hangs a long way down the tree—and retires to look at it. The cock looks at it too. They both study it.
“It is very hard, isn’t it, my dear?” says the cock at last.
“It is a very fine piece of straw though,” replies the hen, slightly piqued.
“Yes,” says the cock, “as a straw it is certainly a very grand specimen. I admit that. The puzzle is how to work it in.”
So they both sit down with their wise wee heads together, and look at that strong straw, and think and wonder in what possible way or shape it can be made use of. They sit there for quite two hours giving vent only to an occasional suggestive “cheep,” and a jerk of their little bodies as if they both had the hiccup. But at last they suddenly awaken to a sense of their folly. Two whole hours of sunshine lost, and all for a straw! That straw is at once cast loose, and both fly off and soon return with something far more useful, if less ornamental. And so the work goes on.
My sparrows build the main portion of their nests principally with hay, straw, and withered weed roots, but this is mixed and mingled with a variety of other material, rags, pieces of old rope or twine; but paper above all things, especially, it appears to me, tracts and bills relating to cheap sales, because the paper on which these are printed is soft. A long string of white or coloured cloth may often be seen fluttering pennant-fashion from a sparrow’s nest. Some believe this is so placed in order to frighten cats and hawks. More likely it is mere slovenliness. Well, a sparrow’s nest outside does look a most untidy wisp. But there is an art in its very untidiness, and the thickness of the nest renders it cool in summer and warm for a shelter-nest during winter. The amount of feathers crammed into a single nest, particularly that of a tree-sparrow, is often quite astounding.
An old nest is sometimes made to do duty over and over again during the season, but it is always overhauled and re-lined.