Water Everywhere It is usually held—and I think rightly—that birds
in hard weather suffer from thirst as well as hunger. Certainly great numbers of them come to running streams in such seasons. This is strange, since snow is water in another form, and it is swallowed greedily by at least one species, and that not the most intelligent. The hen, as my gardener noted the other day, is an almost avaricious devourer of snow when its own water-bowl is frozen hard. Not within the garden but in neighbouring fields a number of victims of the frost and snow have been found, nearly all of them blackbirds. As a rule the migrants suffer much more acutely than the home birds, and it may be that these poor things were on a journey. We now begin to see that there is no sharp distinction between migrants and stay-at-home species. Blackbirds, thrushes and even robins may be among the winter visitors as well as those more strictly migrant members of the thrush tribe, the fieldfare and redwing. The migratory instinct is strong in the whole family—witness that beautiful thrush, known as the American robin, which will breed and flourish in England, but disappears to a bird at the migratory season, though it
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