1885.] 
any other biped American. Nor is he 
like his cousins in changes of @ress. 
Out of a dozen of the latter that may 
be brought down at a shot, you will 
scarcely find three exactly alike. They 
moult at the South, and the young pass 
gradually into adult plumage. The male 
redwing, up to his first autumn, is 
hardly distinguishable in dress from his 
mother, Here he dons his epaulettes, 
beginning with the threadbare worsted 
yellow of the private, and rising in 
grade to the rich scarlet and gold of the 
officer fully commissioned to flame upon 
the marsh and carry havoe among its 
humblest inhabitants. 
A month or two hence, the plover, as 
shy in his Northern haunts as the lark, 
will, in three species, be as much at home 
upon the lawn. Youth and inexperience 
must, as in the case of the other birds, be 
one explanation of this unwonted famili- 
arity. Among other reasons is the abun- 
dance of food, under a mild sky, with 
but rare frosts to bind the earth and no 
snows to cover it. The temperature of 
an average winter day is 60° or 65°. A 
norther is apt to blow three or four times 
in the season, and it brings the mercury 
down to freezing-point or some degrees 
lower. After the two or three days of 
its duration, the first warm morning 
covers the walks and most other bare 
parts of the soil with worm-casts,—re- 
vealing the larders of the smallér birds. 
At an average, too, of four or five places 
in an acre one notices a hillock two 
or three feet in diameter tipped with a 
yellowish spot that deepens into orange 
and broadens as the air grows warm. 
These erections are the work of ants, 
the emergence of which intelligent in- 
sects in greater or less numbers, accord- 
ing to the temperature, causes the color- 
ing which we observe. Intelligent we 
cannot help terming a creature so re- 
markable in its various species for the 
evidences of calculation furnished by its 
habits of life,—evidences nowhere bet- 
ter worth studying than among the leaf- 
cutting, slave-holding, and shade-plant- 
ing ants of Texas; but we are some- 
times tempted to deny the character to 
this particular species when we perceive 
BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER, 
561 
the utter indifference to safety with 
which it selects a site for its commu- 
nistic abode. One of these is located 
in the middle of the principal (sandy 
and unpaved) street of a village, within 
twenty steps of the railroad-track, and 
subject to the impact of wheels and 
mule-, ox-, or horse-hoof many times 
an hour; yet the semblance of a dvwell- 
ing is maintained, and the little tawny 
cloud comes up smiling whenever the 
sun allows, asking no other permission. 
These ant-hills, | am persuaded, supply 
a foundation to certain tufts of low trees 
which spring up in dampish places where 
the spring fires have less sweep. The 
hillocks are well drained, as appears 
from their composition of clear gravel, 
a material of which you will find more 
in one of them than on a surface of 
many feet around; and you may see 
the sweeter grasses gradually mantling 
them, these being followed by herbage 
of larger growth, which, accumulating 
humors at their roots, bourgeon into 
arborescence, until, one vegetable entity 
shouldered into substance and thrift by 
another, the nucleus built by our tiny 
red friends has broadened into a tree- 
clad knoll. “The mezquit, not many 
years ago confined for the most part to 
the arid region beyond the Nueces, is 
spreading eastward, and the clumps of 
it which begin to skirt the original 
copses here may be supposed to owe 
their first foothold to the ant. This 
humble promoter of forestry is duly ap- 
preciated, if only as a viand, by his 
neighbors. Full-grown, and still more 
in the larval stage, he is esteemed by 
them as both a toothsome and a beak- 
some bit. He—or, more numerously, 
she, if we insist on sex and decline the 
more practically correct 7¢—forms thus 
the lowest term in an ascending series 
of animal life that grows out of the ant- 
hill like the tree. So much may one 
such settlement in a rood of ground do 
for the maintenance of organic exist- 
ence, 
A still more diffused, perhaps, if less 
productive, source of life exists in an- 
other burrower and mound-builder, the 
erawfish. Unlike the ant, which likes 
