1907 1 Some Notes Winter Birds. 217 



SOME NOTES ON WINTER BIRDS. 



By C. W. G, Eikrig, 



By our Canadian winter birds are meant certain birds of 

 several different families, which in their coming and going- show- 

 marked inexplicable anomalies or eccentricities, so to speak. To 

 them belong- primarily birds like the pine grosbeak, the Bohemian 

 waxwing, the evening grosbeak, and secondarily birds like the 

 hawk, snowy and Richardson's owls, the Canada jay, and to some 

 extent the redpoll, pine siskin, snowflake and goshawk. Thes e 

 birds are not real migrants, i. t\, birds that come and go to and 

 from their breeding places at nearly the same time each season, 

 and in the same general direction and to the same general destin- 

 ation, so that their winter habitat is well known ; nor are these 

 Canadian winter birds real permanent residents at their breeding 

 localities. They indulge in, what seems to us to be more or less 

 of an aimless wandering about the country, most of them not 

 going much farther south than our southern boundary, if that tar, 

 at all. What induces them to wander over the country in this 

 way, showing up here in numbers one winter and then not coming 

 again for several seasons ? Is it the low temperature prevailing in 

 their northern habitat ? No, because other seasons, severer than 

 the present one here, they remain in their higher latitudes. That 

 also does away with the idea that some people have, that these 

 birds have a certain premonition of an impending serious winter, 

 a certain vague premonitory-barometric sense, allowing them to 

 diagnose the weather in advance, and escape coming hardships ! 

 Is it on account of a failure in their food supply ? Although this 

 is undoubtedly a better reason than the first, it does not: explain 

 all. They indulge in such wanderings when their food supply is 

 not short in their homes to the north. When the Canada jay came 

 here two winters ago, and went in great numbers as far south as 

 Toronto a thing that had not occurred for about fifty years 

 their usual food supply, the kitchens of the lumber camps, the off- 

 al from the farm-houses, were there as usual. Neither can it be 

 assumed that when the snowy owls make their phenominal period- 

 ical incursions into southern territory in such vast numbers, that 



