222 WAKE-ROBIN 



not only serves as a protection against the cold, but 

 supplies the waste of the system when food is scarce 

 or fails altogether. 



The crows at this season are in the same condi- 

 tion. It is estimated that a crow needs at least half 

 a pound of meat per day, but it is evident that for 

 weeks and months during the winter and spring they 

 must subsist on a mere fraction of this amount. I 

 have no doubt a crow or hawk, when in their fall 

 condition, would live two weeks without a morsel 

 of food passing their beaks; a domestic fowl will 

 do as much. One January I unwittingly shut a 

 hen under the door of an outbuilding, where not 

 a particle of food could be obtained, and where 

 she was entirely unprotected from the severe cold. 

 When the luckless Dominick was discovered, about 

 eighteen days afterward, she was brisk and lively, 

 but fearfully pinched up, and as light as a bunch of 

 feathers. The slightest wind carried her before it. 

 But by judicious feeding she was soon restored. 



The circumstance of the bluebirds being embold- 

 ened by the cold suggests the fact that the fear of 

 man, which now seems like an instinct in the birds, 

 is evidently an acquired trait, and foreign to them 

 in a state of primitive nature. Every gunner has 

 observed, to his chagrin, how wild the pigeons 

 become after a few days of firing among them; and, 

 to his delight, how easy it is to approach near his 

 game in new or unfrequented woods. Professor 

 Baird l tells me that a correspondent of theirs visited 

 1 Then at the head of the Smithsonian Institution. 



