54 The Ottawa Naturalist. 



A LITTLE WOOD AND SOME OF ITS FEATHERED 

 DENIZENS. 



By Miss A. C. Tyndall. 



It covers five or six acres of ground perhaps, and is situated 

 partly on the top of a hill, and partly in a deep hollow or ravine. 

 A beautiful little stream takes its way through the hollow, it 

 runs mostly over a bed of sand, and pebbles of many colours ; 

 the water is perfectly clear, the trees — big-leaved bass-woods 

 and large alders — bend over it ; giant ferns droop over the tiny 

 tide. A dead and fallen tree, a relic of the old forest, forms a 

 natural bridge for our miniature river, and where the trees meet 

 over-head the wild clematis links them together in most beauti- 

 fully draped arches. This is in the hollow ; on the high ground 

 grow cedars, ashes, and a few elms, thus affording every bird his 

 favourite tree. Such a little wood is always a favourite place of 

 resort and residence with the greater number of our song-birds, 

 and although the larger birds for the most part prefer wilder, 

 more lonely places, where their enemy, man, is not so likely to 

 find them, there are very interesting birds of this latter descrip- 

 tion to be met with occasionally ; from a lone whip-poor-will 

 who has left his fellows in the high woods of the uplands to act 

 as soloist here, or the owl who may be heard holding forth on 

 a stormy evening in the gruesome manner approved of by his 

 kind, to the sparrow-hawk who has turned a hollow "rampike" 

 rising out of the tangled growth of fern and climatis, into a veri- 

 table ogre's castle to his small neighbours, by making his nest 

 there. 



One of the most beautiful of the .small song-birds to be 

 found in little woods like this, is the goldfinch, also known as 

 the yellow-bird or wild canary. Most people are familiar with 

 the appearance of this little^finch from seeing it as a cage bird — 

 the male with the golden-yellow of his summer plumage well set 

 off by the black of his cap, wings and tail ; his mate no less 

 pretty, though less showy, in her modest garb of olive-green and 



