WEAKNESS OE BIRDS. 
93 
Birds are less hardy in constitution, they possess less facility 
of accommodation,* and they are more severely affected by 
climatic excess than quadrupeds. Besides, they generally want 
the means of shelter against the inclemency of the weather 
and against pursuit by their enemies, which holes and dens 
afford to burrowing animals and to some larger beasts of prey. 
The egg is exposed to many dangers before hatching, and the 
young bird is especially tender, defenceless, and helpless. 
Every cold rain, every violent wind, every hailstorm during 
the breeding season, destroys hundreds of nestlings, and the 
parent often perishes with her progeny while brooding over it 
in the vain effort to protect it.f The great proportional num¬ 
bers of birds, their migratory habits, and the ease with which 
they may escape most dangers that beset them, would seem to 
secure them from extirpation, and even from very great nu¬ 
merical reduction. But experience shows that when not pro- 
lay many square miles under water .—Annales des Fonts et Chaussees , 1847, 
Ire s6mestre, p. 150. 
* Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits. The extension of par¬ 
ticular branches of agriculture introduces new birds ; but unless in the case 
of such changes in physical conditions, particular species seem indissolubly 
attached to particular localities. The migrating tribes follow almost un- 
deviatingly the same precise line of flight in their annual journeys, and 
establish themselves in the same breeding places from year to year. The 
stork is a strong-winged bird and roves far for food, but very rarely estab¬ 
lishes new colonies. He is common in Holland, but unknown in England. 
Hot above five or six pairs of storks commonly breed in the suburbs of 
Constantinople along the European shore of the narrow Bosphorus, while 
—much to the satisfaction of the Moslems, who are justly proud of the 
marked partiality of so orthodox a bird—dozens of chimneys of the true 
believers on the Asiatic side are crowned with his nests. 
t It is not the unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed 
to destruction by severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and strong- 
winged tribes are killed by hail. Severe winters are usually followed by 
a sensible diminution in the numbers of the non-migrating birds, and a 
cold storm in summer often proves fatal to the more delicate species. On 
the 10th of June, 184-, five or six inches of snow fell in Northern Vermont. 
The next morning I found a humming bird killed by the cold, and hanging 
by its claws just below a loose clapboard on the wall of a small wooden 
building where it had sought shelter. 
