[Illustration: ARKANSAS GOLDFINCH. (Spinus psaltria). Life-size. FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES.] TRAGEDY IN BIRD LIFE. For the friends of birds there are, in cold days of wind and storm, opportunities of loving service. In the drama of bird-life the scenes are ever shifting, and struggle for existence is not always under sun-lighted, genial skies. It is true that creative love has endowed the birds with facilities for resisting the havoc of storms. The feathered tribes, nested in chosen coverts, defy the elements and shake out their plumage in fearless defiance of tempests before which man stands in dismay. A little bit of feathered anatomy will sway cheerily on unprotected twigs, disdaining the shelter close at hand, while the storm beats on wayside. The endurance of these creatures of the air may well astonish men, who, with all their vitality and size, succumb, of necessity, to the warring elements. But, in spite of their powers of endurance, the storm-periods are for the birds bitter intervals of life, when hunger and thirst and cold combine to sweep them into the vortex of the lost. It is not the cold, unaccompanied by other influences, which devastates the ranks of the birds during extreme winter storm-periods, however; it is, chiefly, the dearth of food. While the harvest of seeds over the meadows is available the bleak blast moans about our birds innoxiously; but it is when the feathery snowflakes cover this well-stocked granary, clinging about the seed-vessels of weed and flower, and closing it in a frozen locker, or the ice-storm wraps it in glittering ice, that the lairds are beaten before the winds, and perish of cold and starvation. There are few, if any, bird lovers who have not some scene of tragedy to recount; some memory of storm-periods when the birds flew to the habitations of men for help, finding no hope but in the fragments cast away by some human hand. That more thought is not given to the needs of the birds about our doors, at such periods, is due more to the prevailing impression that the birds have the means of providing, even in times of emergency, for their own needs, than to a disregard of the interests of these little friends of the air. Unless we have awakened to pathetic struggle of bird life under some conditions we are not apt to be aroused to any obligation in the matter of aiding in providing for birds in seasons of peril.