400 XATU RE-STUDY REVIEW [i 3 ^_Dcc. f 191 7 



east window, and with the bird glasses in hand,. forgot for a time 

 the trials and perplexities of the week and lived again ! 



Our great day was January 16. It was bitterly cold, one of 

 those clear bright sunny days with a biting wind. The mercury 

 was reported twelve below all day. Our back yard was protected 

 and sunny, and here the birds came in numbers. The food must 

 have been a real boon to them, for they came all day long. Scarcely 

 ever .whenever we looked, did we fail to see at least one bird at the 

 suet. It was the biggest success in a feeding experiment that 

 I had ever achieved, and quite as the bird books say it should be. 

 The first caller that we noticed was the white bellied nuthatch, 

 at eight o'clock. He and his kind were there all day long. Then 

 came downy and his relations; and once or twice we were sure 

 we saw the hairy woodpecker. Then to our delight a red-bellied 

 woodpecker was discovered feeding. Now this is not a common 

 bird in the region and it seldom strays into town from the woods. 

 But here it was, all day long, coming and going. I had to go out 

 and replenish the suet. A blue jay was observed in one of the 

 trees, but he took no interest in the suet. I had tied an ear of 

 corn to one of the trees a few days earlier and he took a few kernels 

 of that. The English sparrow came also, like Satan, but he 

 could not quite balance himself on the swaying branches. Six 

 kinds of birds, all on a bleak January day, right at home ! 



Though this was our biggest day, it was not any more interesting 

 than some others. Often we waded through slush to the woods 

 to try to see some birds, to return, disappointed, to find them in 

 our own back yard feeding on our suet. February 12 was a 

 cloudy day; big flakes of snow were coming softly down upon 

 the ground already well covered with beaten snow. We had 

 taken our lunch to the woods, built a fire and waited for the birds 

 to come; but the woods were strangely silent, and not even the 

 common ones did we see till we reached home, and there they were. 



On March 2 the neighbors telephoned to say that a real spring 

 robin was in our back yard. I ran in haste to the window. There 

 he was, looking over the place deliberately as though he had a 

 notion to buy it. Five days later he or some other cock robin 

 found the wild smilax berries which had hung so long unnoticed 

 by the other birds. Downy and the nuthatch were feeding on 

 the suet, but he gobbled down the berries with alacrity. Later 

 on I saw other big plump fellows tasting them. I hung up another 



