In winter the tree-sparrows gather in small flocks, and are often found associating with the common sparrow, chaffinch, brambling, and other species. At this season they subsist principally on seeds of weeds and grass, but in summer they are partly insectivorous. Chaffinch. Fringilla cœlebs. Forehead black; crown and nape greyish blue; back and scapulars chestnut tinged with green; rump green; breast chestnut-red, fading into white on the belly; wings black, with two white bands; coverts of the secondaries tipped with yellow; tail black, the two middle feathers ash-grey, the two outer, on each side, black, with a broad, oblique white band. _Female_: head, back, and scapulars ash-brown tinged with olive; lower parts greyish white; the transverse bands less distinct. Length, six inches. * * * * * The chaffinch is one of the most popular song-birds in Britain; it is very much with us, being universal in its distribution in this country, and a bird that attaches itself to the neighbourhood of houses, an inhabitant of gardens and orchards, and a resident throughout the year. He is a pretty bird, and, if not a brilliant songster, is at all events a very vigorous one; his lively, ringing lyric, being short and composed of notes invariably repeated in the same order, is capable of being remembered longer and more vividly reproduced in the mind than any other song. Sitting by the fireside in January, you can mentally hear the song of the chaffinch; but the brain is incapable of registering the more copious and varied bird-music in the same perfect way--the music, for instance, of the skylark and thrush and garden-warbler. It is not strange that, when Browning wished to be back in England in April, he thought of the spring song of the chaffinch, before that of any other species. O to be in England Now that April’s there; And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs of the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England now!