122 BIRD WORLD. 



spruce forests, or still further north where the white 

 birches grow, and the owls and foxes are white as the 

 white snow. 



No one knows when to expect these gypsies. Any 

 winter they may appear; the rosy-colored Linnets, 

 in flocks of hundreds, light on the birches and scatter 

 the seed-wings over the snow. The Crossbills go 

 to the spruce cones for their seeds, and the Gros- 

 beaks eat, I am sorry to say, not only the seeds but 

 the buds as well. However, they come so rarely that 

 they do little harm, and they are so beautiful and so 

 tame that every one welcomes them. 



Probably if you were to put on your snowshoes and 

 travel far northward when you heard that these birds 

 had come, till you should come to the great forests 

 where they were born, you would discover why they 

 had come south. 



Not that they fear the cold, for they often live 

 happily where the thermometer goes down to 30° 

 below zero. No, you would look at the trees, and if 

 you saw that the birches, for some reason, had had a 

 poor crop of seeds, as sometimes the apple tree's crop 

 fails, or that there were few cones on the spruces, you 

 would make up your mind that the gypsy birds had 

 wandered south for food. 



