six and eight at a time, and feed at my window, Indian corn and peas
being their specialities. I have large quantities of beech-nuts and
acorns collected every autumn, and thus I can scatter this food also for
pigeons and squirrels all through the winter. Jays, jackdaws, rooks, and
magpies also approve of acorns and beech-nuts, so it is doing a real
kindness to tribes of birds to reserve this food for them until their
other stores are exhausted, and we can thus bring them within our view
and study their interesting ways, their modes of feeding, and, I fear I
must add, their squabbles also, for hungry birds are very pugnacious.

Blackbirds and thrushes are very fond of Sultana raisins; they also like
split groats and brown bread crumbs, as also do starlings and, I
believe, most of the smaller birds. Fat in any shape or form will
attract the various species of titmice to the window. I always keep a
small Normandy basket full of suet and ham-fat hanging on a nail at the
window. It is a great rendezvous for these charming little pets, and it
is also supplied with Barcelona nuts for nuthatches, who fully
appreciate them and carry them off to the nearest tree with rugged bark
into which they fix the nuts, and then hammer at the shell till they can
extract the contents.

In very hard frosts I used always to put out a pan of water, as I feared
the birds suffered from thirst and needed this help. One day, however, I
was comforted to see some starlings, after a good meal of groats, run
off to the grass plot and eagerly peck at the hoar-frost, which, while
it exists, thus supplies the lack of water.

Bewick says linnets are so named from their fondness for linseed, and I
think most of the finches like it. The greenfinch is soon attracted by
hemp seed, and all the smaller birds by canary seed. I hope this paper
may induce many kind hands to minister to the needs of our feathered
friends during the winter months. It is sad to think of their dying for
lack of the food we can so easily afford them, and they will be sure to
repay us by their sweet songs and confiding tameness when summer days
return.

One is apt to think that winter is the only time when birds need our
help and bounty, but there is almost as much real distress after a long
drought in summer, especially amongst the insect-eating birds.

I was led to think of this by the pathetic way in which a hen blackbird
came to the French window of my room early in June last a