human world. The nuthatches,
titmice, woodpeckers, and brown creepers find larvae, grubs, borers,
and insects' eggs in the crannies of the bark and other nooks and
niches; the goldfinches find something to their taste in the buds of
the trees and also make many a meal of thistle and sunflower seeds; the
juncos and tree sparrows, forming a joint stock company in winter,
rifle all kinds of weeds of their seedy treasures; the blue jays lunch
on acorns and berries when they cannot find enough juicy grubs to
satisfy their appetites, and so on through the whole list.

By playing the spy on the birds we may learn much about their dietary
habits. It is the first of January, and we are in a wooded hollow.
There is a tufted titmouse; now he flits to the ground, picks up a
tidbit, darts up to a twig, places his morsel under his claws, and
proceeds to peck it to pieces. Our binocular shows that it is
something yellow, but we cannot make out what it is. As we draw near,
the bird seizes the fragment with his bill--perhaps he fears we will
filch it from him--and flits about among the bushes on the steep bank,
looking for a place to stow his "goody." Presently he pushes it into a
crevice of the bark, hammers it tightly into place, and darts away with
a merry chirp. We go to the spot and find that his hidden treasure is
a grain of corn which he has purloined from the farmer's field on the
slope. A few minutes later another tit--or the same one--slyly thrusts
a morsel in among some leaves and twigs on the bank, even pulling the
leaves down over it for a screen. It turns out to be a small acorn.
That is one of Master Tit's ways--storing away provisions for a time of
need. With his stout, conical beak he is able to break the shell of an
acorn, peck a corn grain into swallowable bits, and tear open the
toughest casing of a cocoon. He will even break the hard pits of the
dogwood berry to secure the kernel within, the ground below often being
strewn with the shell fragments. No danger of _Parus bicolor_ coming
to want or going to the poorhouse.

Another day the juncos are feeding on the seeds of the foxtail or
pigeon grass, in an old orchard hard by the border of the woods.
Sometimes they will make a dinner of berries--the kinds too that are
regarded as poisonous to man--eating the juicy pulp in their dainty
way, and dropping the seeds and rind to the ground. In the ravine
furrowed out by a stream--this is down in one of the holl