Doubtless accidents to animals are far more common than is generally known.  I have seen quails killed by flying against our house when suddenly startled.  Some birds get entangled in hairs of their own nests and die.  Once I found a poor snipe in our meadow that was unable to fly on account of difficult egg-birth.  Pitying the poor mother, I picked her up out of the grass and helped her as gently as I could, and as soon as the egg was born she flew gladly away.  Oftentimes I have thought it strange that one could walk through the woods and mountains and plains for years without seeing a single blood-spot.  Most wild animals get into the world and out of it without being noticed.  Nevertheless we at last sadly learn that they are all subject to the vicissitudes of fortune like ourselves.  Many birds lose their lives in storms.  I remember a particularly severe Wisconsin winter, when the temperature was many degrees below zero and the snow was deep, preventing the quail, which feed on the ground, from getting anything like enough of food, as was pitifully shown by a flock I found on our farm frozen solid in a thicket of oak sprouts.  They were in a circle about a foot wide, with their heads outward, packed close together for warmth.  Yet all had died without a struggle, perhaps more from starvation than frost.  Many small birds lose their lives in the storms of early spring, or even summer.  One mild spring morning I picked up more than a score out of the grass and flowers, most of them darling singers that had perished in a sudden storm of sleety rain and hail.

In a hollow at the foot of an oak tree that I had chopped down one cold winter day, I found a poor ground squirrel frozen solid in its snug grassy nest, in the middle of a store of nearly a peck of wheat it had carefully gathered.  I carried it home and gradually thawed and warmed it in the kitchen, hoping it would come to life like a pickerel I caught in our lake through a hole in the ice, which, after being frozen as hard as a bone and thawed at the fireside, squirmed itself out of the grasp of the cook when she began to scrape it, bounced off the table, and danced about on the floor, making wonderful springy jumps as if trying to find its way back home to the lake.  But for the poor spermophile nothing I could do in the way of revival was of any avail.  Its life had passed away without the slightest struggle, as it lay asleep curled up like a ball, with its tail wrapped about it.

IV

A PARADISE OF BIRDS

    Bird Favorites—­The Prairie Chickens—­Water-Fowl—­A Loon on
    the Defensive—­Passenger Pigeons.