Dae areae ae OAN SB Usgirinioy rel N eh 
feeding rapidly in the trees within 100 feet of the nest, often making trips 
to the nest with food three times per minute. After the sixth day, when 
the young birds began to show the beginnings of feathers, the parent spent 
practically no time during the day on the nest, but used all its time for 
feeding. 
No “Phoe-be” songs were heard after the young hatched. The only 
songs uttered were a few “Chick-a-dee-dees,” scolding the observer on 
several approaches to the nest. 
The young birds gained size rapidly during the first week and had 
their first coat of thin black feathers on the tenth day. Their eyes opened 
on the eleventh day, and on the thirteenth day they looked, for the first 
time, like chickadees. Within the next three days they grew rapidly and 
appeared fully developed on the sixteenth day. By the nineteenth day they 
had left the nest. 
Harvey, Illinois. 
fH fi ft 
Winter in the Smokies 
By LILLIAN CRAMP 
WE HAVE spent this winter in a log cabin between two mountain ranges in 
the Great Smokies region. We are out in the country a few miles, with 
woods and a small stream that never freezes over, on one side, and an open 
meadow on the other. We are about half way between southern Florida and 
Chicago, but the difference in altitude partly balances the difference in 
latitude, so far as birdlife and climate are concerned. After eight winters 
in Florida we have enjoyed the old bird friends again. 
We have about the same birds here that we had in and around Chicago, 
except that some stay all winter that did not stay there. We have had the 
usual hardy ones at the feeding shelves right through snow, some zero 
weather, and much ten above zero. Blue jays, cardinals, nuthatches, downy 
and hairy woodpeckers, chewinks, tits, and chickadees were constant 
boarders. The chickadee, of course, is the Carolina chickadee. He looks 
just like the familiar blackcap, but his song is different. Instead of the 
usual “pee-wee,” this one has a fuzzy “phee, phee- wee, wee.” There are 
always four notes. 
Brown thrasher came up out of the woods on the very cold days. He 
began singing March 12 from the tops of the tallest trees, and has been 
singing most of the day ever since. I thought there was only one, but the 
day he started singing I saw a female slipping through the underbrush. 
The song sparrow has been a very satisfactory bird neighbor. He not 
only sang all summer, but most of the winter. Mornings that were so cold 
that the rhododendrons were all curled up I could hear his “sweet, sweet, 
sweet.” He rather considers himself special owner of a large flat rock 
where we scatter cracked corn intended for all such birds as like it. He is 
very pugnacious and unafraid and chases birds twice his size. He soon 
learned that I drove the common sparrow away, and when I appeared at the 
