226 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIEDS 



sound. It is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony 

 with winter. I stole up within five or six feet of a pitch 

 pine behind which a downy woodpecker was pecking. 

 From time to time he hopped round to the side and ob- 

 served me without fear. They are very confident birds, 

 not easily scared, but incline to keep the other side of 

 the bough to you, perhaps. 



Feb. 12, 1854. You hear the lisping tinkle of chick- 

 adees from time to time and the unrelenting steel-cold 

 scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, 

 a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold ; hard, tense, 

 frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery 

 of winter's band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the 

 winter sky. There is no hint of incubation in the jay's 

 scream. Like the creak of a cart-wheel. 



March 12, 1854. I hear a jay loudly screaming phe- 

 phay phe-phay, — a loud, shrill chickadee's phebe. 



March 10, 1856. The pinched crows are feeding in 

 the road to-day in front of the house and alighting on 

 the elms, and blue jays also, as in the middle of the 

 hardest winter, for such is this weather. The blue jays 

 hop about in yards. 1 



June 5, 1856. A blue jay's nest on a white pine, 

 eight feet from ground, next to the stem, of twigs lined 

 with root-fibres ; three fresh eggs, dark dull greenish, 

 with dusky spots equally distributed all over, in Hos- 

 mer (?) pines twenty-seven paces east of wall and 

 fifty-seven from factory road by wall. Jay screams as 

 usual. Sat till I got within ten feet at first. 



1 [The jay is not so terrestrial in its habits as the crow and therefore, 

 unlike its relative, is a hopper, not a walker.] 



