Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/221

1857.] 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 hereabouts; and I was told at Vergennes, in Vermont, that there were quails there many years ago, but that they had now entirely disappeared.

The appearance and disappearance of species within our experience teach us that Nature's lists are not filled once for all, but that the changes which geology shows in past ages continue into the present. Sometimes we can trace the immediate cause, or rather occasion, as in the case of the quail's congeners, the pinnated grouse, and the wild turkey, both of them inhabitants of all parts of the State in the early times. The pinnated grouse has been seen near Boston within the present century, but is now exterminated, I believe, except in Martha's Vineyard. The wild turkey was to be found not long since in Berkshire, but probably it has become extinct there too. Sometimes, for no reason that we can see, certain species forsake their old abodes, as the purple martin, which within the last quarter-century has receded some twenty miles from the seaboard,—or appear where they were before unknown, as the cliff swallow, which was first seen in the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains, but within about the same space of time has become as common hereabouts as any of the genus. In examples so conspicuous the movement is obvious enough; but in the case of rarer species, for instance, the olive-sided flycatcher, who can tell whether, when first observed, it was new to naturalists merely, or to this part of the country, or to the earth generally? The distinction sometimes made in such cases between accidental influences and the regular course of nature is a superficial one. The regular course of nature is in