hungry birds and beasts of prey. One of the most patent signs of this is the 

 great prevalence of white in their costumes. The Snowy Owl, for instance, 

 the chief rapacious bird of the high north, is white (more or less profusely 

 flecked or barred with sooty brown) throughout the year. During the few 

 weeks of arctic summer, when it hunts and nests on mossy, treeless tundras 

 or barrens, it must be a conspicuous object when seen from above against 

 the ground (although even then it may often be mistaken for a scrap of lin- 

 gering snow or ice). But it has little or nothing to fear from predaceous 

 enemies, and its summer diet consists chiefly of lemmings and other small 

 mammals which live on the open ground, so that the owl always appears 

 above them, against the sky; hence white serves it as it serves the seafaring 

 terns and gulls (Chapter XII) and the partly white-masked mammals to 

 be described in a later chapter. Another northern bird, colored almost 

 exactly like the Snowy Owl, and with kindred habits, is the White Gerfal- 

 con. In addition to these more or less predominantly white birds (ptar- 

 migans, owls, and falcons), many of the smaller species of the winter North 

 are largely marked with white (irrespective of their obliterative white under- 

 sides). Noteworthy among these are the woodpeckers, titmice, some of the 

 Fringillidce, and two or three of the Corvidce (namely, the magpies and the 

 North American Blue Jay). Most of them wear a pied or boldly speckled 

 pattern of black and white, which reaches its highest development on some 

 of the woodpeckers, as the Hairy and Downy (Dryobates villosus and D. 

 pubescens) of America, and the Great-spotted and White-backed (Picus 

 major and P. leuconotus) of Europe. These woodpeckers are in fact cov- 

 ered with adequate generalized pictures of bits of winter landscape, where 

 dark tree trunks and branches relieve against the snow or sky. Fig. 83 

 (photographed from a picture made by combining a real Hairy Woodpecker's 

 skin with a painting of a winter-forest landscape) will tell the reader more than 

 many words. Even in summer, though less wonderfully fitted to the land- 

 scape, these woodpeckers are far from being conspicuous birds. The larger 

 outstanding spots of white still often pass for glints of sky seen through the 



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