304 NOTES ON THE 



PLECTROPHENAX NITALIS (L ) (534.) 

 SNOWPLAKE. 



No Minnesotian, compelled by duties, or depletions of his 

 purse, to see his more favored friends hie them away from 

 our zeros, and blizzards without him, can fail to welcome and 

 cherish his best appreciations of the Snow Buntings, which 

 appear variously from the 25th of October to the 10th of 

 November in bands, or small parties of a dozen to twenty or 

 thirty. They are usually met with earliest in the more wild 

 and unimproved broad prairies, where the seeds of grasses 

 and coarser seeds are most abundant. 



Indeed, in some of our severest winters which generally 

 afford less deep snows, I have known them, to remain in the 

 most unprotected, fieldless sections, to such an extent that bird 

 observers have insisted upon their exceptional scarcity until 

 made aware of their mistake by accidentally vis-iting those 

 localities during a severe storm perhaps. Undisturbed by the 

 obtrusive presence of observers, they will perhaps seek their 

 food under the slightest elevations, but they almost unexcep- 

 tionally avoid anything approximating a covert. I was pro- 

 foundly impressed with the wisdom of this habit many years 

 ago. The day, in February, was one of those ' 'only read of in 

 books" by persons in the timbered, prairieless latitudes below 

 us. The mercury was 37° beJow zero, (45° during the night 

 following), and a wind from the northwest was blowing at a 

 fearful rate when I was summoned professionally twelve miles 

 away across continuous rolling prairie, with barely snow 

 enough on the ground to justify runners instead of wheels. I 

 began at once to observe frequent flocks of perhaps forty or 

 fifty to one hundred Snow Buntings, almost unceasingly rolick- 

 ing and cavorting on the wing as if to them it was "the great 

 day of the feast." How they could survive, not to say possibly 

 endure, such fierce blasts of frozen winds was inscrutible, but 

 to see them apparently so jolly was more than a mystery. 

 Presently in the very middle of the treeless waste, I 'saw a 

 fiock drop into a cluster of weeds slightly protected by a little 

 elevation of the general surface of the ground, and instantly 

 engage in feeding. 



Scarcely a moment had passed when from another like eleva- 

 tion my eye caught a glimpse of an almost invisible tiny 

 object, half a mile away to the northwest, coming like a bullet 

 before the spinning wind, directly for the spot where the 

 Buntings were feeding close to the drifted snow. 



