22 THE OREGON SPORTSMAN 
FEEDING THE BIRDS 
By Fiorence Merriam Battey, Author of “Handbook of the Birds of Western 
United States.’’ 
So much snow fell in the Coast Mountains of Oregon in the winter 
of 1909 that at Garibaldi, a fishing village about a hundred miles 
southwest of Portland, there was sleighing for two weeks, which was 
quite phenomenal for that part of the humid coast belt where the 
ground rarely freezes during the winter. So much more snow fell in 
the mountains than on the shore that after the birds’ food supply had 
been covered for a week the Mountain Robins and Snowbirds, as the 
people call them, came down, descending upon the village in a horde. 
A graphic account of the occurrence was given Me by Mr. William. 
Derby, who at the time was keeping the village hotel. 
About a dozen of the birds came first and began to eat with the 
chickens. “That’s the way we first noticed they were hungry,” Mr. 
Derby said, and his wife added, “They were kind o’ wild, chirpin’ 
around in the trees.” When the starving birds saw food they soon 
lost their fears. “It was just like the Gulls,” Mr. Derby declared. “If 
they’d see you throwing out anything they’d light down just as the 
Gulls do. We went to feeding them bread crumbs at first, and the 
more we'd throw out to them the more would come.’ Some would try 
to fly into the windows, and once when the pantry door was open, 
about fifty of them swarmed in there, making a roar in the narrow 
space. 
“They got so thick we didn’t have bread crumbs enough to feed 
them and so took to feeding them corn meal by ten-pound sacks. 
They’d come every morning and we'd string corn meal around two 
sides of the piazza—the piazza was sixty feet long—and they’r 
swarm over that just as thick as they could get—Robins and Snow- 
birds together—there must have been a thousand of them. I never 
saw such a sight of birds after we began to feed them. The piazza 
would be just black with them. They were so nearly starved they 
would fight over the food, and some of them were so weak that they 
couldn’t fly up after they’d flown down—they’d just reel.” 
“We fed them as long as they kept a-comin’, about two weeks, all 
of seven or eight sacks of meal besides bread and oatmeal and pota- 
toes,” the generous landlord stated ungrudgingly. 
“It must be fierce for those poor little fellows—get so hungry they 
can’t hardly live,” his sympathetic wife added. 
When the tide was out, in spite of the rations served at the hotel, 
the beach would be covered with birds catching sand fleas. 
On cold nights perhaps fifty Mountain Robins and Snowbirds 
would take refuge in the shed of the hotel. “Go out there with a lan- 
tern and they’d hop around and bump themselves,” the landlord said. 
“IT saw lots of the Robins dead—no Snowbirds—up in the trees 
where they’d hang onto the branches,” he concluded. 

