3804 NOTES ON THE 
PLECTROPHENAX NIVALIS (L.). (534.) 
SNOWFLAKE. ; 
No Minnesotian, compelled by duties, or depletions of his 
purse, to see his more favored friends hie them away from 
our zeros, and blizzards without him, can fail to welcome and 
cherish his best appreciations of the Snow Buntings, which 
appear variously from the 25th of October to the 10th of 
November in bands, or small parties of a dozen to twenty or 
thirty. They are usually met with earliest in the more wild 
and unimproved broad prairies, where the seeds of grasses. 
and coarser seeds are most abundant. 
Indeed, in some of our severest winters which generally 
afford less deep snows, I have known them to remain in the 
most unprotected, fieldless sections, to such an extent that bird 
observers have insisted upon their exceptional scarcity until 
made aware of their mistake by accidentally visiting those 
localities during a severe storm perhaps. Undisturbed by the 
obtrusive presence of observers, they will perhaps seek their 
food under the slightest elevations, but they almost unexcep- 
tionally avoid anything approximating a covert. I was pro- 
foundly impressed with the wisdom of this habit many years 
ago. The day, in February, was one of those ‘‘only read of in 
books” by persons in the timbered, prairieless latitudes below 
us. The mercury was 37° below zero, (45° during the night 
following), and a wind from the northwest was blowing at a 
fearful rate when I was summoned professionally twelve miles 
away across continuous rolling prairie, with barely snow 
enough on the ground to justify runners instead of wheels. I 
began at once to observe frequent flocks of perhaps forty or 
fifty to one hundred Snow Buntings, almost unceasingly rolick- 
ing and cavorting on the wing as if to them it was ‘‘the great 
day of the feast.” » How they could survive, not to say possibly 
endure, such fierce blasts of frozen winds was inscrutible, but 
to see them apparently so jolly was more than a mystery. 
Presently in the very middle of the treeless waste, I saw a 
flock drop into a cluster of weeds slightly protected by a little 
elevation of the general surface of the ground, and instantly 
engage in feeding. 
Scarcely a moment had passed when from another like eleva- 
tion my eye caught a glimpse of an almost invisible tiny 
object, half a mile away to the northwest, coming like a bullet 
before the spinning wind, directly for the spot where the 
Buntings were feeding close to the drifted snow. 
