278 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIRDS 



Jan. 6, 1856. While I am making a path to the 

 pump, I hear hurried rippling notes of birds, look up, 

 and see quite a flock of snow buntings coming to alight 

 amid the currant-tops in the yard. It is a sound almost 

 as if made with their wings. What a pity our yard was 

 made so tidy in the fall with rake and fire, and we have 

 now no tall crop of weeds rising above this snow to 

 invite these birds! 



Jan. 21, 1857. As I flounder along the Corner road 

 against the root fence, a very large flock of snow bunt- 

 ings alight with a wheeling flight amid the weeds rising 

 above the snow in Potter's heater piece, 1 — a hundred 

 or two of them. They run restlessly amid the weeds, so 

 that I can hardly get sight of them through my glass ; 

 then suddenly all arise and fly only two or three rods, 

 alighting within three rods of me. (They keep up a 

 constant twittering.) It was as if they were any instant 

 ready for a longer flight, but their leader had not so 

 ordered it. Suddenly away they sweep again, and I see 

 them alight in a distant field where the weeds rise above 

 the snow, but in a few minutes they have left that also and 

 gone further north. Beside their rippling note, they have 

 a vibratory twitter, and from the loiterers you hear quite 

 a tender peep, as they fly after the vanishing flock. 



What independent creatures! They go seeking their 

 food from north to south. If New Hampshire and 

 Maine are covered deeply with snow, they scale down 



1 [A " heater piece," in the parlance of old New England, is a tri- 

 angular plot of ground, so called from its resemblance in shape to a 

 flat-iron heater, a triangular piece of cast iron which was heated and 

 put into the old-fashioned flat-iron.] 



