672 Bob IV kite, the Game Bird of America. 



ground be covered with snow or hoar frost, or the weather be wet 

 or blustering, they may remain huddled together all day, or may not 

 venture to feed till late in the forenoon. But if they are greeted 

 with the sunrise and good weather, they cheep a good-morning to 

 one another in soft, cheerful voices, and go at once to their feeding- 

 grounds, where they regale themselves on the wheat of the stubbles, 

 the buckwheat, the seeds of grasses, and the rag-weed, and on the 

 berries of the haw, the gum, and the chicken-grape. About ten or 

 eleven o'clock they retire to the sunny side of a covert, 'and they do 

 not venture forth again till three or four in the afternoon, when they 

 again seek their food till sundown and bed-time. 



In October and November, the sportsman often " springs " coveys 

 containing birds too small to be shot ; sometimes half the covey will 

 be in this condition, the other half full-grown birds. This fact may 

 be accounted for thus : The eggs and the young are often destroyed 

 by the wet and cold of the early summer, or by beasts and birds of 

 prey. If this calamity should overtake them, the hen again goes to 

 laying, and this second brood is retarded by the time lost between 

 the first and second nestings. When birds of two sizes are found in 

 the same covey, it seems to show that the parents have raised two 

 broods ; and this, I think, happens oftener to the south than to the 

 north of the James River, — the summer of our middle and northern 

 States being generally too short for the raising of two broods. 

 Baird says: "They have two broods in a season, the second in 

 August"; while Audubon states that "in Texas, the Floridas, and 

 as far eastward as the neighborhood of Charleston, in South Carolina, 

 it breeds twice in the year, first in May, and again in September." 



The cock-bird shares with the hen the duties and restraints of 

 incubation. If his spouse should desire another brood, he will take 

 charge of the half-grown young while she makes her second nest- 

 ing. When the second brood appears, it runs with the first, and 

 they form together one happy family, and remain with their parents 

 till the following spring, in the pairing season, when the old family 

 ties are severed. 



The devotion of the parents to their unfledged young, and the 

 real affection which the members of a family have for one another 

 up to the time of their separation in the spring, have been so touch- 

 ingly described by two of the most gifted of our writers on field 



