top," and maybe the recollection will cause me to stay my hand.
The sparrows have the Old World hardiness and prolificness; they are
wise and tenacious of life, and we shall find it by and by no small
matter to keep them in check. Our native birds are much different, less
prolific, less shrewd, less aggressive and persistent, less quick-witted
and able to read the note of danger or hostility--in short, less
sophisticated. Most of our birds are yet essentially wild, that is,
little changed by civilization. In winter, especially, they sweep by
me and around me in flocks,--the Canada sparrow, the snow-bunting, the
shore-lark, the pine grosbeak, the red-poll, the cedar-bird,--feeding
upon frozen apples in the orchard, upon cedar-berries, upon maple-buds,
and the berries of the mountain ash, and the celtis, and upon the seeds
of the weeds that rise above the snow in the field, or upon the hay-seed
dropped where the cattle have been foddered in the barn-yard or about
the distant stack; but yet taking no heed of man, in no way changing
their habits so as to take advantage of his presence in nature. The pine
grosbeak will come in numbers upon your porch, to get the black drupes
of the honeysuckle or the woodbine, or within reach of your windows to
get the berries of the mountain-ash, but they know you not; they look
at you as innocently and unconcernedly as at a bear or moose in their
native north, and your house is no more to them than a ledge of rocks.

The only ones of my winter neighbors that actually rap at my door are
the nut-hatches and woodpeckers, and these do not know that it is my
door. My retreat is covered with the bark of young chestnut-trees, and
the birds, I suspect, mistake it for a huge stump that ought to hold
fat grubs (there is not even a bookworm inside of it), and their loud
rapping often makes me think I have a caller indeed. I place fragments
of hickory-nuts in the interstices of the bark, and thus attract the
nut-hatches; a bone upon my window-sill attracts both nut-hatches and
the downy woodpecker. They peep in curiously through the window upon me,
pecking away at my bone, too often a very poor one. A bone nailed to a
tree a few feet in front of the window attracts crows as well as lesser
birds. Even the slate-colored snow-bird, a seed-eater, comes and nibbles
it occasionally.

The bird that seems to consider he has the best right to the bone both
upon the tree and upon the sill is the downy woodpecke