t found a
warmer and safer lodging for the night in the cellar.

In the fall, birds and fowls of all kinds become very fat. The
squirrels and mice lay by a supply of food in their dens and retreats,
but the birds, to a considerable extent, especially our winter
residents, carry an equivalent in their own systems, in the form of
adipose tissue. I killed a red-shouldered hawk one December, and on
removing the skin found the body completely encased in a coating of
fat one quarter of an inch in thickness. Not a particle of muscle was
visible. This coating not only serves as a protection against the
cold, but supplies the waste of the system when food is scarce or
fails altogether.

The crows at this season are in the same condition. It is estimated
that a crow needs at least half a pound of meat per day, but it is
evident that for weeks and months during the winter and spring they
must subsist on a mere fraction of that amount. I have no doubt that a
crow or hawk, when in his fall condition, would live two weeks without
a morsel of food passing his beak; a domestic fowl will do as much.
One January I unwittingly shut a hen under the door of an outbuilding,
where not a particle of food could be obtained, and where she was
entirely unprotected from the severe cold. When the luckless Dominick
was discovered, about eighteen days afterward, she was brisk and
lively, but fearfully pinched up, and as light as a bunch of feathers.
The slightest wind carried her before it. But by judicious feeding she
was soon restored.

The circumstances of the bluebirds being emboldened by the cold
suggests the fact that the fear of man, which by now seems like an
instinct in the birds, is evidently an acquired trait, and foreign to
them in a state of primitive nature. Every gunner has observed, to his
chagrin, how wild the pigeons become after a few days of firing among
them; and, to his delight, how easy it is to approach near his game in
new or unfrequented woods. Professor Baird [footnote: Then at the head
of the Smithsonian Institution] tells me that a correspondent of
theirs visited a small island in the Pacific Ocean, situated about two
hundred miles off Cape St. Lucas, to procure specimens. The island was
but a few miles in extent, and had probably never been visited half a
dozen times by human beings. The naturalist found the birds and
water-fowls so tame that it was but a waste of ammunition to shoot
them. Fixing a noose on the end