As the paramount question in the life of a bird is the question of food, perhaps the most serious troubles our feathered neighbors encounter are early in the spring, after the supply of fat with which Nature stores every corner and by-place of the system, thereby anticipating the scarcity of food, has been exhausted, and the sudden and severe changes in the weather which occur at this season make unusual demands upon their vitality.  No doubt many of the earlier birds die from starvation and exposure at this season.  Among a troop of Canada sparrows which I came upon one March day, all of them evidently much reduced, one was so feeble that I caught it in my hand.

During the present season, a very severe cold spell the first week in March drove the bluebirds to seek shelter about the houses and outbuildings.  As night approached, and the winds and the cold increased, they seemed filled with apprehension and alarm, and in the outskirts of the city came about the windows and the doors, crept beneath the blinds, clung to the gutters and beneath the cornice, flitted from porch to porch, and from house to house, seeking in vain from some safe retreat from the cold.  The street pump, which had a small opening just over the handle, was an attraction which they could not resist.  And yet they seemed aware of the insecurity of the position; for no sooner would they stow themselves away into the interior of the pump, to the number of six or eight, than they would rush out again, as if apprehensive of some approaching danger.  Time after time the cavity was filled and refilled, with blue and brown intermingled, and as often emptied.  Presently they tarried longer than usual, when I made a sudden sally and captured three, that found a warmer and safer lodging for the night in the cellar.

In the fall, birds and fowls of all kinds become very fat.  The squirrels and mice lay by a supply of food in their dens and retreats, but the birds, to a considerable extent, especially our winter residents, carry an equivalent in their own systems, in the form of adipose tissue.  I killed a red-shouldered hawk one December, and on removing the skin found the body completely encased in a coating of fat one quarter of an inch in thickness.  Not a particle of muscle was visible.  This coating not only serves as a protection against the cold, but supplies the waste of the system when food is scarce or fails altogether.

The crows at this season are in the same condition.  It is estimated that a crow needs at least half a pound of meat per day, but it is evident that for weeks and months during the winter and spring they must subsist on a mere fraction of that amount.  I have no doubt that a crow or hawk, when in his fall condition, would live two weeks without a morsel of food passing his beak; a domestic fowl will do as much.  One January I unwittingly shut a hen under the door of an outbuilding, where not a particle of food could be obtained, and where she was entirely unprotected from the severe cold.  When the luckless Dominick was discovered, about eighteen days afterward, she was brisk and lively, but fearfully pinched up, and as light as a bunch of feathers.  The slightest wind carried her before it.  But by judicious feeding she was soon restored.