the asparagus bed. The bluebirds appeared to be trying to glean
something from the bark of trees, clinging rather awkwardly to the trunk
meanwhile. (They are given to this, more or less, at all times, and it
possibly has some connection with their half-woodpeckerish habit of
nestling in holes.) Some of the snow-birds were doing likewise; I
noticed one traveling up a trunk,--which inclined a good deal, to be
sure,--exploring the crannies right and left, like any creeper. Half a
dozen or more phoebes were in the edge of a wood; and they too seemed
to have found out that, if worst came to worst, the tree-boles would
yield a pittance for their relief. They often hovered against them,
pecking hastily at the bark, and one at least was struggling for a
foothold on the perpendicular surface. Most of the time, however, they
went skimming over the snow and the brook, in the regular flycatcher
style. The chickadees were put to little or no inconvenience, since what
was a desperate makeshift to the others was to them only an every-day
affair. It would take a long storm to bury their granary.[22] After the
titmice, the fox-colored sparrows had perhaps the best of it. Looking
out places where the snow had collected least, at the foot of a tree or
on the edge of water, these adepts at scratching speedily turned up
earth enough to checker the white with very considerable patches of
brown. While walking I continually disturbed song sparrows, fox
sparrows, tree sparrows, and snow-birds feeding in the road; and when I
sat in my room I was advised of the approach of carriages by seeing
these "pensioners upon the traveler's track" scurry past the window in
advance of them.

It is pleasant to observe how naturally birds flock together in hard
times,--precisely as men do, and doubtless for similar reasons. The edge
of the wood, just mentioned, was populous with them: robins, bluebirds,
chickadees, fox sparrows, snow-birds, song sparrows, tree sparrows,
phoebes, a golden-winged woodpecker, and a rusty blackbird. The last,
noticeable for his conspicuous light-colored eye-ring, had somehow
become separated from his fellows, and remained for several days about
this spot entirely alone. I liked to watch his aquatic performances;
they might almost have been those of the American dipper himself, I
thought. He made nothing of putting his head and neck clean under water,
like a duck, and sometimes waded the brook when the current was so
strong that he