Our Responsibility 7 



(Some pages chosen at random.) Time^ February; place, Birdcraft, and 

 about the cottage on the hill. Recorders: Chickadees, Purple Finches, Juncos, 

 Tree Sparrows, a pair of Winter Wrens, an Acadian Owl, a Brown Thrasher 

 that did not migrate, a flock of Pine Grosbeaks, half a dozen Black-crowned 

 Night Herons, and some Pheasants. 



Thermometer, four below; an hour after sunrise; trees ice-coated; a sound 

 of chopping is heard, with a ring of metal on ice. Chickadees flitting about 

 the feeding-shelf by the house porch find it empty; they move over to another 

 inside the animal-proof fence. A great yellow dog, gaunt and hungry, standing 

 as high as a wolf, comes nightly for the suet; this last time, however, the 

 warden discovered him, and henceforth he will put all bones and fats, not only 

 high up but behind a double screen. 



The warden comes up from the spillway of the little pond; though the 

 steely cold has locked all other sounds, running water babbles; the birds 

 leave their food and fly toward the sound as by a single impulse; follow them, 

 walking slowly, for the frozen snow underfoot gives out shrill squeaks like the 

 warning cry of small rodents. 



The water is gushing over the narrow spillway from under the heavy ice 

 that covers the pond, and runs clear, a tiny thread of a stream, but free and 

 shallow between the heavily grassed banks of the overflow, screened by bushes 

 from the north and west, a veritable trap to catch and hold the early morning 

 sunbeams. 



Bird-calls and scraps of song come from the water, and there is much 

 splashing and preening as the birds bathe and jostle each other, while some 

 of the more timid await their turn. Mind you, it is below zero on the north 

 side of the hill. It was the warden's responsibility to see that the winter 

 bathing-place was kept open in the one spot where the water from some warm 

 springs in the pond fed it, and all that bitter winter the little stream was 

 freed each morning by a few strokes from the axe and ran all day long. 



Thus, word was passed through the winter-braving tribes of the region 

 that not only was food to be had in Birdcraft, but water, precious water. 



As the warden made his morning rounds, keen eyes searching ground, trees, 

 and sky, he saw two sets of footprints going toward heavy brush; those of a 

 Pheasant running i)arallel with those of a weasel that at this time wears his 

 white winter coat and mascjuerades as royal ermine. 



Expecting a tragedy, he pushes through the brush to find, not a dead Pheas- 

 ant, but a rabbit, whose life-blood the weasel has sucked and then abandoned 

 the victim; a little beyond, a glistening heap of feathers that stirs as if 

 moved in some way, gives the warden a start, for a gorgeous male Pheasant is 

 held by the tail a fast prisoner, the moist snow of the previous evening having 

 turned to ice, forging chains of the long feathers. Without the foresight which 

 makes this daily patrol the warden's self-imposed responsibility, this Pheasant 

 would ha\e died of hun<rer and cold. 



