Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/49



as it is to find any constant traits to characterize January, not less of an uncertain quantity is the second month in the year's chaplet. On the one hand, its days, so evidently lengthening, may be full of hopeful tokens, in the shape of budding shrubs and thickening tree-tops, that the sap is on the rise, while in a less genial season its sullen skies, with a cold, damper and more penetrating than that of frosty January, may bring the worst of the winter. Not only is there no advance, but it seems at times as if spring had recalled its pickets and ceased even to threaten winter's reign. How sere and colourless are the landscapes under drear February skies before the grass shows any new growth and when one must search the most sheltered hollow for half a dozen stray primroses. Look on this picture and then on that of a February such as that of 1891, sunny throughout, and practically rainless in the London district. Yet, apart from extremes, the month has a character of its own. Its place is between the frost and the east winds. The sun which tempers its humid airs draws a daily in-increasing volume of song from the thrushes and