HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 99 



pair of catbirds that nest each year in a red-osier dog- 

 wood beneath my study window, love to feed. Out in 

 our abandoned clearing, however, I do not begrudge 

 them the berries, which grow in a corner where the 

 vanished farmer made his last cutting of timber. 

 Many a time I have lam on the ground up the slope in 

 f ruiting season and watched a catbird darting back and 

 forth to these vines, as if his appetite were insatiable, his 

 trim gunmetal body taking the sun on head or wing-tip. 

 Presently I would get up and stroll over to gather some 

 berries for myself. You would have thought a band of 

 human pickers had been there, to see all the whitish, 

 thimble-shaped hulls hanging denuded from their stems. 

 Even as I would put out my hand for a red fruit there 

 would come from the thicket close by a mew of protest 

 and an angry flutter of wings. Though, in my own ex- 

 perience, the catbirds are most addicted to raspberries, 

 the thrushes, orioles, robins, flickers, and cedar wax- 

 wings also eat them, and doubtless other birds besides. 

 But there are many other harvest products in and 

 about our pasture besides the raspberries. Even the 

 weeds yield their store, and in Autumn, or better still 

 in Whiter, when the weed tops stand up dry and stiff 

 above a light covering of snow, you may see the Can- 

 adian or tree sparrows (so called, perhaps, because they 

 spend most of their lives on the ground !) hopping up to 

 peck at the seeds, or occasionally one more wise shaking 

 ihe seeds down and picking them up from the snow. In 



