174 
NATURE STUDY. 
to a distant seed patch, while we put down our glasses, 
looked at each other and gasped, “ Well /” in the common¬ 
place way people do just after they have seen an unusually 
attractive thing. The snow bunting is not a common win¬ 
ter bird with us, we usually see but one or two flocks in a 
season. 
Tree sparrows were more plentiful in our usual drives 
last year than this and true to the full-fledged ornithologists’ 
statement, which avers that you can’t see birds from a car¬ 
riage, you have to tramp the quiet small woods to see Spi- 
zella monticola, now. 
American Mergansers in their old haunt in theMerrimac 
below Goffs Falls, very small flocks of crows, larger ones 
of chickadees, a few nuthatches, downy and hairy wood¬ 
peckers, tree sparrows, snow buntings, and blue jays,, with 
the foregoing kinglets, brown creepers, gold finches, and 
the two Canada jays complete our January list of birds. 
All but the tree sparrows were seen from the sleigh or car¬ 
riage. 
The shrike we have yet to see this year. A friend of 
mine asked me what large bluish-gray bird an English spar¬ 
row would attack. Said he had seen one fighting a gray 
bird as large as a robin, and the.sparrow was pecking it 
fearfully in the throat. He seemed amazed when I said he 
had probably seen a shrike who had just captured a spar¬ 
row in its claws, and that the latter was fighting for its life. 
“And I had thought it the other way around,’’ he said. 
