296 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIRDS 



perhaps they eat them on the snow. Some of the seeds 

 have blown at least fifteen rods southeast. So the hem- 

 lock seed is important to some birds in the winter. 



Jan. 16, 1860. I see a flock of tree sparrows busily 

 picking something from the surface of the snow amid 

 some bushes. I watch one attentively, and find that it is 

 feeding on the very fine brown chaffy-looking seed of 

 the panicled andromeda. It understands how to get its 

 dinner, to make the plant give down, perfectly. It flies 

 up and alights on one of the dense brown panicles of the 

 hard berries, and gives it a vigorous shaking and beat- 

 ing with its claws and bill, sending down a shower of 

 the fine chaffy-looking seed on to the snow beneath. It 

 lies very distinct, though fine almost as dust, on the 

 spotless snow. It then hops down and briskly picks up 

 from the snow what it wants. How very clean and agree- 

 able to the imagination, and withal abundant, is this 

 kind of food ! How delicately they fare ! These dry 

 persistent seed-vessels hold their crusts of bread until 

 shaken. The snow is the white table-cloth on which they 

 fall. No anchorite with his water and his crust fares 

 more simply. It shakes down a hundred times as much 

 as it wants at each shrub, and shakes the same or an- 

 other cluster after each successive snow. How bounti- 

 fully Nature feeds them ! No wonder they come to spend 

 the winter with us, and are at ease with regard to their 

 food. These shrubs ripen an abundant crop of seeds to 

 supply the wants of these immigrants from the far north 

 which annually come to spend the winter with us. How 

 neatly and simply it feeds ! 



This shrub grows unobserved by most, only known 



