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THE SNOWBIRD OR SNOW-FLAKE. 



(Plectrophanes Nivalis.) 



It would be about as easy to depict a Canadian 

 winter, without its snow-drifts, as it were to imagine 

 the fleecy plains and solitary uplands of Canada in 

 winter without their annual visitors, the Snow-bunting, 

 better known to our youth under the appropriate 

 name of Snowbird. 



In New England it is styled the Snow-flake ; " it 

 comes and goes with these beautiful crystallizations, as if 

 itself one of them, and comes at times only less thickly. 

 The Snow-bird is the harbinger and, sometimes, the fol- 

 lower of the storm. It seens to revel, to live on snow 

 and rejoices in the northern blast, uttering, overhead, 

 with expanded wing, its merry call " preete-preete," 

 reserving, as travellers tell us, a sweet, pleasant song 

 for its summer haunts, in the far-north, where it builds 

 its warm, compact nest on the ground, or in the fissures 

 of rocks on the coast of Greenland, &c." The Snow-bird 

 is part and parcel of Canada. It typifies the country 

 just as much as the traditional Beaver, recently 

 abstracted, as an emblem, from Jean-Baptiste by the 

 Scotch descendants of the earl of Sterling, on whose 

 arms it figured as early as 1632 — according to Douglass 

 Brymner. 



Thousands of these hardy migrants, borne aloft on 

 the breath of the March storms, come each spring, whirl- 

 ing round the heights of Charlesbourg, or launch their 

 serried squadrons over the breezy uplands of the lovely 

 isle facing Quebec, the Isle of Orleans ; one Islander 

 alone last spring, to my knowledge, having snared more 

 than one hundred dozen for the Quebec, Montreal and 

 United States markets. 



The merry, robust " Oiseau Blanc " is indeed the 

 national bird of French Canada : it succesfully inspired 

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