PAYING A MIDWINTER VISIT 
Photograph by Wilbur F. Smith 
This shows a bird visitor attracted by the lump of suet fastened to the old pear tree. 
A lump of suet set in some convenient place is perhaps the surest way of securing bird 
visitors in midwinter, for it is a food supply they greatly appreciate. 
The average house when surrounded by 
proper planting almost invariably looks 
better than if left to stand out cold and 
hard and with base-line unbroken. Wind- 
breaks may almost always be planted 
somewhere, with benefit to the farm as 
well as to the birds, while lanes may be 
bordered with trees and shrubbery and 
walls covered with vines without any 
possible encroachment on the fields. An 
old pasture planted with savin and white 
pine, hawthorns, elders, barberries, cor- 
nels, viburnums, and the like, may easily 
be metamorphosed into a bird reserva- 
tion and still be useful as a pasture. 
For deciduous growth to be used for 
cover, choose those berry-bearing trees 
and shrubs whose berries are most popu- 
lar with the birds; and, when possible, 
choose also those that may offer most 
convenient sites for nest-building. 
166 
SOME USEFUL FOOD PLANTS 
Care must also be taken in the choice 
of species, so as to get, if possible, a con- 
tinuous supply of food, using such plants 
as the cherry, mulberry, raspberry, blue- 
berry, huckleberry, etc., for the summer 
supply; elder and the various kinds of 
dogwood and viburnum, etc., for autumn; 
while for winter choose those plants 
which hold their fruit longest, such as 
the hawthorn, buckthorn, mountain ash, 
barberry, bayberry, sumach, wild rose, 
and the like. 
Hedges, particularly if they are ever- 
green, are favorite resorts for birds, both 
in winter and summer, and an arbor-vite 
hedge is the best of them all. I remem- 
ber such a hedge about one side of my 
father’s old-fashioned garden that in 
summer invariably held its quota of rob- 
ins’, song sparrows’, and chipping spar- 
