Starlings in Europe often travel about the country in great flocks, which frequently consist of several thousand birds. Sometimes, too, several of these flocks join together at night, and then separate again next morning. We have seen a little copse so full of roosting starlings that every branch of every tree was occupied from end to end, while thousands more kept flying in, and trying to turn the first comers off their perches! And they made so much noise that we could hear them chattering and quarreling when we were more than a mile away. Each flight of starlings seems to have its leader whose orders are instantly obeyed, for every bird in the whole flock swerves, and wheels, and turns at the same moment--a maneuver seen equally in the vast migratory flocks of red-winged blackbirds which gather in autumn on every American marsh and are gradually spreading inland. A few years hence the bird may be seen all over the United States. Starlings are useful birds, although they certainly steal a great deal of fruit; for if it were not for their labors--together with those of certain other birds--our corn and vegetable crops would certainly be destroyed by the mischievous grubs which live at the roots. So we ought to look on the fruit which starlings take as wages paid them for their work. [Illustration: FINCHES AND WEAVER-BIRDS. 1. European Yellowhammer. 2. African Weaver-Bird (Male). 3. African Weaver-Bird (Female). 4. European Goldfinch. 5. Stonechat.] FINCHES We now come to the great group of the finches, which can easily be recognized by their short, stout, strong beaks. This is one of the most extensive families of birds, for it includes, besides the finches properly so called, all the sparrows, grosbeaks, buntings, and seed-eaters of the world, together with many other similar birds known by various names. The small robust size, and especially the cone-shaped beak, suitable for cracking seeds, or tearing the husks of fruit to pieces, are the badges of the family. Sometimes this beak is big and strong, as in our northern rose-breasted, or the southern cardinal grosbeak, or the British bullfinch; sometimes small and slender, as in the sparrows, such as our pretty visitor to the garden lilacs and rose-bushes, the chipping-bird; sometimes queerly out of shape, as in the crossbills, where the lower half, or mandible, of the bill does not meet the upper one squarely at the tip, but the points cross past one another. These birds dwell in the northern evergreen forests, and subsist almost wholly on the seeds of the pine and spruce, which they twist out from beneath the tough scales of the cones with remarkable skill, apparently using the crossed bill like a pair of pliers.