t one genuine snow bird,
nursling of the snow, and that is the snow bunting, a bird that seems
proper to this season, heralding the coming storm, sweeping by on bold
and rapid wing, and calling and chirping as cheerily as the songsters
of May. In its plumage it reflects the winter landscape,--an expanse of
white surmounted or streaked with gray and brown; a field of snow with
a line of woods or a tinge of stubble. It fits into the scene, and does
not appear to lead a beggarly and disconsolate life, like most of our
winter residents. During the ice-harvesting on the river, I see them
flitting about among the gangs of men, or floating on the cakes of ice,
picking and scratching amid the droppings of the horses. They love the
stack and hay-barn in the distant field, where the farmer fodders his
cattle upon the snow, and every red-root, ragweed, or pigweed left
standing in the fall adds to their winter stores.

Though this bird, and one or two others, like the chickadee and
nuthatch, are more or less complacent and cheerful during the winter,
yet no bird can look our winters in the face and sing, as do so many of
the English birds. Several species in Great Britain, their biographers
tell us, sing the winter through, except during the severest frosts; but
with us, as far south as Virginia, and, for aught I know, much farther,
the birds are tuneless at this season. The owls, even, do not hoot, nor
the hawks scream.

Among the birds that tarry briefly with us in the spring on their way to
Canada and beyond, there is none I behold with so much pleasure as the
white-crowned sparrow. I have an eye out for him all through April
and the first week in May. He is the rarest and most beautiful of the
sparrow kind. He is crowned, as some hero or victor in the games. He is
usually in company with his congener, the white-throated sparrow, but
seldom more than in the proportion of one to twenty of the latter.
Contrasted with this bird, he looks like its more fortunate brother,
upon whom some special distinction has been conferred, and who is, from
the egg, of finer make and quality. His sparrow color of ashen gray
and brown is very clear and bright, and his form graceful. His whole
expression, however, culminates in a singular manner in his crown. The
various tints of the bird are brought to a focus here and intensified,
the lighter ones becoming white, and the deeper ones nearly black.
There is the suggestion of a crest, also, from a ha