friends suppose, but
are to be found all winter. Nor is insect-life suspended at this
season to the extent that a careless observer might suppose. A sunny,
sheltered nook, at any time during the winter, will show you a variety
of two-winged flies, and several species of spiders, often in
considerable abundance, and as brisk as ever. And the numbers of eggs,
and larvae, and of the lurking tenants of crevices in tree-bark and
dead wood, may be guessed by the incessant and assuredly not aimless
activity of the chickadees and gold-crests and their associates.

This winter activity of the birds ought to be taken into account by
those who accuse them of mischief-doing in summer. In winter, at
least, no mischief can be done; there is no fruit to steal; and even
sap-sucking, if such a practice at any time be not altogether
fabulous, certainly cannot be carried on now. Nothing can be destroyed
now except the farmer's enemies, or at best neutrals. Yet the birds
keep at work all the time.

The only bird that occurs to me as a proved sufferer from famine in
the winter is the quail. This is the most limited in its range of all
our birds. Not only does it not migrate, (or only exceptionally,) but
it does not even wander much,--the same covey keeping all the year,
and even year after year, to the same feeding-ground. Nor does it ever
seek its food upon trees, like the partridge, but solely upon the
ground.

The quail is our nearest representative of the common barn-yard
fowl. This it resembles in many respects, and among others, in its
habit of going a-foot, except when the covey crosses from one feeding
or roosting ground to another, or when the cock-bird mounts upon a
rail-fence or stone-wall to sound his call in the spring. This
persistence exposes the quail to hardship when the ground is covered
with snow, and the fruit of the skunk-cabbage and all the berries and
grain are inaccessible. He takes refuge at such times in the
smilax-thickets, whose dense, matted covering leaves an open
feeding-ground below. But a snowy winter always tells upon their
numbers in any neighborhood. Whole coveys are said to have been found
dead, frozen stiff, under the bush where they had huddled together for
warmth; and even before this extremity, their hardships lay them open
to their enemies, and the fox and the weasel, and the farmer's boy
with his box-trap, destroy them by wholesale. The deep snows of 1856
and 1857 have nearly exterminated them