22 Birds Every Child Should Know 
bits of suet, cheap raisins, raw peanuts chopped 
fine, cracked hickory nuts and rinds of pork. 
The free lunch counters are freely patronised. 
There is scarcely an hour in the day, no matter 
how cold, when some hungry feathered neigh- 
bour may not be seen helping himself to the 
heating, fattening food he needs to keep his 
blood warm. 
At the approach of warm weather, chickadees 
retreat from public gaze to become temporary 
recluses in damp, deep woods or woodland 
swamps where insects are most plentiful. For 
a few months they give up their friendly flock- 
ing ways and live in pairs. Long journeys 
they do not undertake from the North when it 
is time to nest ; but Southern birds move north- 
ward in the spring. Happily the chickadee may 
find a woodpecker’s vacant hole in some hollow 
tree; worse luck if a new excavation must be 
made in a decayed birch — the favourite nursery. 
Wool from the sheep pasture, felt from fern 
fronds, bits of bark, moss, hair, and the fur of 
“little beasts of field and wood” — anything 
soft that may be picked up goes to line the hol- 
low cradle in the tree-tpunk. How the crowded 
chickadee babies must swelter in their bed of 
fur and feathers tucked inside a close, stuffy hole ! 
Is it not strange that such hardy parents should 
coddle their children so? 
