HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 103 



visible before. This garden-patch, too, is murmurous 

 with bees on a warm summer morning. Later the finch 

 returns to the sunflowers for their seeds, and later still 

 you may see the chickadees darting quickly and cheerily 

 out of the pines on the same errand. 



Pine buds are still another form of food the pasture 

 affords, and the English pheasants which have overrun 

 our Berkshire woods in the last decade are the feeders. 

 The pheasant is a walking bird, treading with one foot 

 directly behind the other in a perfectly straight line, 

 and he will often tramp for miles without leaving the 

 ground. I have myself tracked one in light snow for 

 more than two miles, and found him at the end in a 

 nest of leaves. Unlike the partridge (perhaps because 

 they are protected fifty-one weeks in the year), the 

 pheasants like to feed in open spaces, and they par- 

 ticularly affect our pasture because many little seedling 

 pines have begun to creep out from the forest edge and 

 climb the slope, especially around the spring. Only the 

 other day, walking softly on snow-shoes, we came out of 

 the woods into the open dazzle and saw four brown 

 pheasants close to the spring, waddling on the snow. 

 They did not fly up till we were within fifty feet of 

 them. The snow was two feet deep, and it had thus 

 raised their feeding level. Their tracks were every- 

 where about the seedling pines, and the juicy little 

 terminal buds, which had been out of reach before the 

 storm, were nipped off by the hundred. Snow which 



