Odds and Ends 135 



to the observer than that most birds love company, and 

 a good deal of it. Their genial conversation among 

 themselves as they pursue their work and play fully 

 proves that. Another object is undoubtedly protection. 

 Birds have enemies, many of them, and when the woods 

 are bare there is little chance for hiding, and so they must 

 be especially on the alert. Let a hawk come gliding 

 silently and slyly down the vale, and before he gets too 

 near some keen little eye espies him, the alarm is sounded, 

 and the whole company scurries into the thickets or trees 

 for safety. The chickadees and titmice seem to be a sort 

 of sentry for the company. 



A large part of the time in birdland is spent in solv- 

 ing the "bread-and-butter" problem. And how do our 

 feathered citizens solve this important problem in the 

 cold weather? Nature has spread many a banquet for 

 her avian children, although they must usually rustle for 

 their food just as we x must in the human world. The 

 nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, and brown creepers 

 find larvae, grubs, borers, and insects' eggs in the crannies 

 of the bark and other nooks and niches; the goldfinches 

 find something to their taste in the buds of the trees and 

 also make many a meal of thistle and sunflower seeds; 

 the juncos and tree sparrows, forming a joint stock com- 

 pany in winter, rifle all kinds of weeds of their seedy treas- 

 ures; the blue jays lunch on acorns and berries when they 

 cannot find enough juicy grubs to satisfy their appetites, 

 and so on through the whole list. 



By playing the spy on the birdrs we may learn much 



