birds would
brave the rigors of our winters. I have known a pair of bluebirds
to brave them on such poor rations as are afforded by the
hardhack or sugarberry,--a drupe the size of a small pea, with a
thin, sweet skin. Probably hardly one per cent. of the drupe is
digestible food. Bluebirds in December will also eat the berries
of the poison ivy, as will the downy woodpecker.

Robins will pass the winter with us when the cover of a pine or
hemlock forest can be had near a supply of red cedar berries. The
cedar-bird probably finds little other food in the valley of the
Hudson and in New England, yet I see occasional flocks of them
every winter month.

Sometimes the chickadees and nuthatches, hunting through the
winter woods, make a discovery that brings every bird within
hearing to the spot,--they spy out the screech owl hiding in the
thick of a hemlock-tree. What an event it is in the day's
experience! It sets the whole clan agog.

While I was walking in the December woods, one day, my attention
was attracted by a great hue and cry among these birds. I found
them in and about a hemlock-tree,--eight or ten chickadees and
four or five red-bellied nuthatches. Such a chiding chorus of
tiny voices I had not heard for a long time. The tone was not
that of alarm so much as it was that of trouble and displeasure.

I gazed long and long up into the dark, dense green mass of the
tree to make out the cause of all this excitement. The chickadees
were clinging to the ends of the sprays, as usual, apparently
very busy looking for food, and all the time uttering their
shrill plaint. The nuthatches perched about upon the branches or
ran up and down the tree trunks, incessantly piping their
displeasure. At last I made out the cause of the disturbance,--a
little owl on a limb, looking down in wide-eyed intentness upon
me. How annoyed he must have felt at all this hullabaloo, this
lover of privacy and quiet, to have his name cried from the
treetops, and his retreat advertised to every passer-by!

I have never known woodpeckers to show any excitement at the
presence of hawk or owl, probably because they are rarely
preyed upon by these marauders. In their nests and in their
winter quarters, deeply excavated in trunk or branch of tree,
woodpeckers are beyond the reach of both beak and claw.

The day I saw the winter wren I saw two golden-crowned kinglets
fly from one sycamore to another in an open field, uttering their
fine call-no