Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius)waked me in the dawn,coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house,as if sent out of the woods for this purpose.In the course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn,which had not got ripe,on to the snow-crust by my door,and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it.In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal.All day long the red squirrels came and went,and afforded me much entertainment by their manuvres.One would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks,running over the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind,now a few paces this way,with wonderful speed and waste of energy,making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,”as if it were for a wager,and now as many paces that way,but never getting on more than half a rod at a time;and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset,as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,-for all the motions of a squirrel,even in the most solitary recesses of the forest,imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,-wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,-I never saw one walk,-and then suddenly,before you could say Jack Robinson,he would be in the top of a young pitch pine,winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators,soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,-for no reason that I could ever detect,or he himself was aware of,I suspect.At length he would reach the corn,and selecting a suitable ear,frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my woodpile,before my window,where he looked me in the face,and there sit for hours,supplying himself with a new ear from time to time,nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about;till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food,tasting only the inside of the kernel,and the ear,which was held balanced over the stick by one paw,slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground,when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty,as if suspecting that it had life,with a mind not made up whether to get it again,or a new one,or be off;now thinking of corn,then listening to hear what was in the wind.So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon;till at last,seizing some longer and plumper one,considerably bigger than himself,and skillfully balancing it,he would set out with it to the woods,like a tiger with a buffalo,by the same zigzag course and frequent pauses,scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while,making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal,being determined to put it through at any rate;-a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;-and so he would get off with it to where he lived,perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant,and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.
At length the jays arrive,whose discordant screams were heard long before,as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off,and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree,nearer and nearer,and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped.Then,sitting on a pitch pine bough,they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them;and after great labor they disgorge it,and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills.They were manifestly thieves,and I had not much respect for them;but the squirrels,though at first shy,went to work as if they were taking what was their own.
Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks,which,picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped,flew to the nearest twig,and,placing them under their claws,hammered away at them with their little bills,as if it were an insect in the bark,till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats.A little flock of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile,or the crumbs at my door,with faint flitting lisping notes,like the tinkling of icicles in the grass,or else with sprightly day day day,or more rarely,in springlike days,a wiry summery phe-be from the woodside.They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in,and pecked at the sticks without fear.I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden,and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar,and occasionally stepped upon my shoe,when that was the nearest way.
When the ground was not yet quite covered,and again near the end of winter,when the snow was melted on my south hillside and about my wood-pile,the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there.Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings,jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high,which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust,for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter.It is frequently covered up by drifts,and,it is said,“sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow,where it remains concealed for a day or two.”I used to start them in the open land also,where they had come out of the woods at sunset to “bud”the wild apple trees.They will come regularly every evening to particular trees,where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them,and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little.I am glad that the partridge gets fed,at any rate.It is Nature's own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink.