I have never tried them with the young of other birds, but I have tried their young with canaries. My canaries are the dearest and best of parents to their own nestlings, but none of them will feed the babies of other canaries. As for young robins, yellow warblers, finches, and sparrows, they utterly ignore them, unless they have particularly piercing voices. In these cases the canaries grow nervous and stuff their own young ones as if they thought the cries of distress issued from their throats.
Once I saw a canary hitch up to a young sparrow and look down its throat. He then shook his crest and hopped away, as if to say, “I could never fill that cavity.” Two summers ago I put a demure, well-behaved young sparrow baby into a cage of German canaries. She hopped into the nest, settled her little gray body down among the four yellow birds, and unheeding the mother’s impatient pushes and shrugs, sat there till she grew old enough to take to a perch. After a time I took her out of the cage and put her on the veranda. She played there all day, but every night she came in to sleep near the canaries.
I knew she was in the room, for she flew out every morning when I opened the screen-door, but where was her sleeping-place? I looked high and low, but could not find her for a long time, until late one night, when I was saying, “I wonder where that bird is?” I saw something move slightly on the top of the canaries’ cage. A sheet was thrown over it, and under the sheet was the smallest and flattest projection. I laughed as I looked at it, and said, “I have found it at last.”
Every night this quaint little sparrow, Judy by name, had crawled up under the sheet and had slept on the wires of the cage, over her foster-mother and the young canaries. It was a very uncomfortable sleeping-place, and after I found her out she never used it again, but took to a box on the wall near a mirror. There she sat calmly gazing at me night after night as I held up the light to look at her.
She was so interesting that I could not let her go. She seems to recognize a certain kinship with the street sparrows, for she chirps excitedly to them, but she does not care to go out with them, and has chosen for a mate a widowed Java sparrow, who is not so devoted to her as she is to him. He is good to her, however, and flies about with her, but she does all the nest-making. This summer she had a curious structure of straw among some fir branches that she kept adding to, until it was over a foot long. For some months she laid eggs in the middle of this nest. Occasionally I took out a few and gave them to the other birds to eat, but when I lifted the nest down this autumn there were still a dozen in it.
I was sorry she had been too flighty to rear some Java and English sparrow-hybrids. They would have been most interesting. Perhaps she will have more steadiness next summer. I used to be amused with her at breakfast-time. She would lean far out of her nest to see what I was giving to the other birds, then with a joyful sound to her mate that sounded like, “O Java,” she would fly down to investigate.
One sparrow I had, learned to sing some of the notes of the Brazil cardinal. The cardinal hated him and beat him frequently, but the sparrow followed him from place to place, and practised his little tune till it was becoming quite perfect. A sparrow is said to have a good vocal apparatus, and I suppose there is no reason why he should not sing if he wants to. Unfortunately, I put this bird out of the aviary, and I have never heard him sing again. Perhaps the birds in the street shamed him out of it.
My sparrows have mostly been good sparrows, and as a class have not been greater fighters than other birds. I have observed them in the aviary and out of it, and have rarely seen them chase or annoy smaller birds. In the city, goldfinches, robins, some warblers, purple finches, and song-sparrows came about the roof-veranda, and talked to the birds inside the netting, and sometimes my canaries go out and fly about, but the sparrows never interfere with them.
On my farm the sparrows were equally good. They never injured the tiny wild birds that came for food, but fed peaceably with them. On neighboring farms sparrows were known to tear swallows’ nests to pieces, but they never molested my swallows, though they built close to our house doors. I think possibly the reason lay in the abundance of food scattered about. The little rogues knew that there was enough for them summer and winter. They understood that I liked them, and they did not harm my other pets.
They are most intelligent birds. Living by their wits has developed them amazingly. In Paris I used to be interested with their discrimination in the matter of making friends. An elderly man who fed a flock in the Tuileries Gardens had gained the confidence of every member of it. They would not come to strangers, but when he called “Jeanne! Pierre!” and the rest of their names, each bird would fly to him in turn.