When winter comes the struggle for existence among the birds is intensified, and comparatively few of them dare face it. Most of our birds betake themselves to less rigorous quarters, leaving to the sparrow a comparatively small number of competitors for the diminished supply of food. As long as the snow is off the ground the sparrows can find sufficient sustenance. They gather themselves into groups and sally out from the city into the open country. The immediate result is that great quantities of weed seeds are seized upon by the English sparrow, as, indeed, by every other finch which is with us in winter. Perhaps we have not given the little fellow credit for the good he does at this particular time, for the rest of the account truly does not help him in our esteem. There is a further direct advantage in the sparrow's sociability. One robin may nest in the vines about your porch. If there were room for a dozen, scarcely more than one would be likely to use it, because he would drive away any other robin who attempted to share the neighborhood with him. To the sparrow company is always in order. While he may quarrel from morning until night with his fellow, it is a sociable quarrel and neither would willingly forgo it. This union is strength among birds, as with man. Every animal is safer from his enemies when he can have the constant presence of others of his own kind. The deer that stays in the herd is safer from the wolves. It is only when the latter succeed in cutting out some weaker or less sagacious animal that these carnivorous creatures succeed in tearing down their prey. I think the superiority of the sparrow over most of our common birds, when considered as a city dweller, is scarcely understood. Because he had won in the race with other birds is no necessary indication that he warred directly against them. Bird-men often attribute to him a quarrelsome disposition, as if he actually drove other birds away. It almost seems like animosity against the sparrow to speak of him as attacking blackbirds and crows. It is a cowardly crow who can be driven away by a sparrow, and if the two cannot live together it seems to me certainly to the discredit of the crow and not of the sparrow. I believe the truth to be that, while the sparrow is undoubtedly a quarrelsome fellow, his bickerings are his form of social converse with those of his own kind. A quarrel among themselves seems not to indicate animosity, but would appear to be the sparrow's idea of conviviality. It rarely leads to serious results. I have never seen a male sparrow trounce any other bird with half the vigor that I have occasionally seen the mother sparrow evince when she caught her male companion by the feathers of his head, hung him over the side of the limb, and vigorously and thoroughly shook him until he desisted from his annoying and possibly insulting attentions. The truth of the matter is that a colony of these little birds, with