8 T-HiE”-A U DU BY0O-N7.B Ue Eee aie 
gangrene, and perhaps sickness killed it rather than cold. Anyway it was 
’way past the time when herons should be here though great blues are seen 
occasionally, and it must have had a bad time. 
Yet ten to one, so long as an animal finds food or can doze away, it 
does not suffer even in sub-zero weather. We saw a little bird apparently 
hanging as if in distress, a foot caught in a weed, we thought, upside down. 
Said I, is it starved? But when we came up to it it flew off with a saucy 
“dew-dew-dew” and flirted its tail in great, good spirits. It was simply 
getting an extra bite to eat from a spear of weed hard to get at. "Twas 
a snowbird, junco the books call him, and nothing at all was wrong with him. 
As people travel along the highway they see flocks of these and other 
birds busily feeding in the tire tracks. What the birds find, God knows: 
sometimes grain is scattered there, though it ought to be distributed farther 
away. When their feet get cold they squat awhile to relieve the pain, then 
proceed to fill up some more. Seldom are they identified for what they are. 
There may be flocks of horned larks among them, cousins of the skylark 
of Europe; they may be tree sparrows, they may be starlings. The impor- 
tant point is they are not all just one kind of bird, “sparrow.” Along the 
fence will be a song sparrow or two, and rarely a field sparrow; in lower 
ground a swamp sparrow; in low woods white-throated sparrows, those 
aristocrats of the sparrow tribe, or fox sparrows. 
Then when you reach a well-kept farm, or rather if you get around 
to the pig-pen and fodder yard you find many other kinds. Red-winged 
blackbirds, twenty — thirty at a time will be there, and some rusty black- 
birds from the north, and one or two common blackbirds which the books 
call bronzed grackles. Alas a lot of European birds will be there too, the 
European starling, which looks like a stub-tailed blackbird, and the pestifer- 
ous house or English sparrow which isn’t a sparrow at all, that is, does 
not belong in the family of sparrows and true finches but in an African 
and Australian outfit known as weaver finches and waxbills. A third 
European interloper, the European tree sparrow, is seen only around St. 
Louis where it was released back in 1890. It resembles the house sparrow 
both in appearance and habits, and at least two colonies have been estab- 
lished in our area. 
Other kinds also mingle freely with the hogs and cows at this larking 
time of year. The mourning dove so gentle and dainty, in appearance at 
least, will get terrifically wrought up over some spilled corn or even a scrap 
of meat. We counted twenty on one fence wire waiting for the farmer to 
feed his cattle. Cardinals, of all things, drop down in the mud and juncos 
and native sparrows have a gay time, too, at the trough. 
Back in a protected place near the custodian’s residence is a famous 
feeding place called Birds’ Breakfast Room. It is next door to their sleep- 
ing quarters and serves very well to fill up their craws before the day’s 
work. Since suet is served up to them and mixed with grain and seeds, 
hordes of birds are attracted. Bobwhite whirr up as you approach and 
pheasants are not above paying a hasty call. Titmice, chickadees, nut- 
hatches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, they all come trouping in along 
with a terrified brown creeper, or a golden-crowned kinglet, though the 
latter does not get down to the feed-tray. It is here that a family of 
