A PUZZLE IN BIRDS 



ways and no slaves to fashion. The male in summer, 

 with his resplendent yellow and black plumage, is gay 

 enough, yet he lays all this grandeur aside for the 

 winter and goes garbed like his plainer wife. Hardy 

 birds, they often flock about us through our coldest 

 winters, and well might they be, we should think, 

 among our earliest breeders. Yet they spend the 

 spring and summer in play and at the last possible 

 moment, as though it was a stupid task from which 

 they shrank, they finally set to work to build nests and 

 rear babies. The eggs are usually laid in a soft, dainty 

 nest on a bush or sapling in a swamp or by the roadside 

 in late July or early August. The young are not awing 

 till well along in August and it is often pitiful, when 

 September frosts come, to find the callow fledglings in 

 the garden, barely able to flutter from their nest, 

 chilled and piping plaintively. Ned called my atten- 

 tion to some in this predicament on a very cold day, the 

 fifteenth of September. That same year I photo- 

 graphed a brood of them in a willow thicket beside 

 the railroad track about the twentieth of August, and 

 I tried hard to snap the parents feeding them, but 

 when the camera was near the nest they would not 

 approach, no matter how long I waited. 



It would be a great omission not to speak of the 

 Snow Bunting, that hardy boreal bird which has well 

 earned also the name Snowflake, from the whiteness of 

 its plumage. I have seen them by hundreds on the 

 wintry seacoast, on beach, marsh or sand dunes. I wish 



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