Where do all the birds, myriads in number and scores in species, go when they leave the North in the winter?  A small minority lags, not superfluous, for we are delighted to have them, but in a subdued, pinched, and hand-to-mouth mode of existence in marked contrast to their summer life and perceptibly marring the pleasure of their society.  They flock around our homes and assume a mendicant air that is a little depressing.  Unlike the featherless tramps, they pay very well for their dole; but we should prefer them, as we do our other friends, to be independent, and that although we know they are but winter friends and will coolly turn their backs upon us as soon as the weather permits.  The spryest and least dependent of them all, the snow-bird, who sports perpetual full dress, jerks at us his expressive tail and is off at the first thaw, black coat, white vest, and all.  No tropics or sub-tropics for him.  He can stand our climate and our company with a certain condescending tolerance so long as we keep the temperature not too much above zero, but grows contemptuous when Fahrenheit grows effeminate and forty.  Nothing for it then but to cool off his thin and unprotected legs and toes in the snows of Canada.  “The white North hath his” heart.  Our winter is his summer.  There is nothing in his anatomy to explain this idiosyncrasy.  His physical construction closely resembles that of his insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes.  He has no discoverable provision against cold.  Adaptation to environment does not seem to cover his case.  It does not cover his legs.  They remain unfeathered.  We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots where the snow has been blown away.  Compared with the ptarmigan and the snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests a survival of the unfittest.

The movements of this tough little anti-Darwinian are overlapped by the bluebird and the robin,—­our robin, best entitled to the name, inasmuch as it is accorded him by fifty-odd millions against thirty millions who give it to the redbreast,—­who are usually with him long before he gets away.  They never move very far southward, but watch the cantonments of Frost, ready to advance the moment his outposts are drawn in and signs appear of evacuation.  Their climate, indeed, is determined in winter rather by altitude than by latitude.  The low swamps and pineries that skirt tide-water in the Middle States furnish them a retreat.  Thence they scatter themselves over the tertiary plain as it widens southward beneath the granite bench that divides all the great rivers south of the Hudson into an upper and a lower reach.  Detachments of them extend their tour to the Gulf.  Readers of “A Subaltern on the Campaign of New Orleans in 1814-15” will recall his mention of the assemblage of robins hopping over the Chalmette sward that were the first living inhabitants to welcome the weary invaders on emerging from the palmetto marshes.  They can hardly be said to reach the particular region of which we propose to speak, both species, the bluebird especially, being almost strangers to it.