22 Birds Every Child Should Know 



bits of suet, cheap raisins, raw peanuts chopped 

 fine, cracked hickory nuts and rinds of pork. 

 The free lunch counters are freely patronised. 

 There is scarcely an hour in the day, no matter 

 how cold, when some hungry feathered neigh- 

 bour may not be seen helping himself to the 

 heating, fattening food he needs to keep his 

 blood warm. 



At the approach of warm weather, chickadees 

 retreat from public gaze to become temporary 

 recluses in damp, deep woods or woodland 

 swamps where insects are most plentiful. For 

 a few months they give up their friendly flock- 

 ing ways and live in pairs. Long journeys 

 they do not undertake from the North when it 

 is time to nest ; but Southern birds move north- 

 ward in the spring. Happily the chickadee may 

 find a woodpecker's vacant hole in some hollow 

 tree; worse luck if a new excavation must be 

 made in a decayed birch — the favourite nursery. 

 Wool from the sheep pasture, felt from fern 

 fronds, bits of bark, moss, hair, and the fur of 

 "little beasts of field and wood" — anything 

 soft that may be picked up goes to line the hol- 

 low cradle in the tree-trunk. How the crowded 

 chickadee babies must swelter in their bed of 

 fur and feathers tucked inside a close, stuffy hole! 

 Is it not strange that such hardy parents should 

 coddle their children so? 



