146 
SINGING BIRDS. 
CHICKADEE. 
PaRUS ATRICAl'ILLUS. 
Char. Above, ashy gray ; below, grayish white; flanks buffy; crown 
and throat black ; cheek white. Length 4^ to inches. 
M'si. In a cavity made in a decayed stump, entering from the top or 
side ; composed of wool or inner fur of small mammals firmly and 
compactly felted. Sometimes moss and hair are used, and a lining of 
feathers. 
5 “^ > "'bite speckled with reddish brown , 0.60 X 0.50. 
This familiar, hardy, and restless little bird chiefly inhabits 
the Northern and Middle States as well as Canada, in which it 
is even resident in winter around Hudson’s Bay, and has been 
met with at 62° on the northwest coast. In all the Northern 
and Middle States, during autumn and winter, families of these 
birds are seen chattering and roving through the woods, busily 
engaged in gleaning their multifarious food, along with Nut- 
hatches and Creepers, the whole forming a busy, active, and 
noisy group, whose manners, food, and habits bring them 
together in a common pursuit. Their diet varies with the 
season ; for besides insects, their larvae and eggs, of which they 
are more particularly fond, in the month of September they 
leave the woods and assemble familiarly in our orchards and 
gardens, and even enter the thronging cities in quest of that 
support which their native forests now deny them. Large 
seeds of many kinds, particularly those which are oily, as the 
sunflower and pine and spruce kernels, are now sought after. 
These seeds, in the usual manner of the genus, are seized in 
the claws and held against the branch until picked open by the 
bill to obtain their contents. Fat of various kinds is also 
greedily eaten, and they regularly watch the retreat of the hog- 
killers in the country, to glean up the fragments of meat which 
adhere to the places where the carcases have been suspended. 
At times they feed upon the wax of the candle-berry myrtle 
{Myrica cerifera) ; they likewise pick up crumbs near the houses, 
and search the weather-boards, and even the window-sills. 
