The bird feeder is crowded with intermittent flocks of chickadees, juncos, and sparrows, all the ever present winter birds, pecking at seed, flying off, hopping on the snow, each with intense, nervous, active habits, keeping their wild, interrelated ways, entering in, displacing each other, disappearing and returning. A bolt of a bird suddenly tears in from nowhere and all the little ones are gone in a burst. A sharp-shinned hawk, a small hawk with an appetite for songbirds, has attacked in hunger and desperation, but it swerves when it reaches the feeder--its aim disturbed by fear as it approaches the house--and crashes into the window. It sits on the snow, terribly stunned, its head drooping. The body is the light umber of an immature bird, the breast streaked red. After a few minutes it stirs a little, wing shoulders twitching, head up, and yellow eyes glaring with the pure wild look of a hawk. Finally it lifts up quickly and beats away toward a line of trees in the distance. The chickadees are soon back, jumping down to the feeder from an overhanging pitch pine and bouncing back up like small puffs of snow, having left danger behind with their usual vibrant but sturdy acceptance. They are businesslike, determined little birds. If I could only get inside that head behind the tiny black eyes, and follow. I could swear it has the quickest perception of things. In any case it acts as if there were no time for leisure. Its whole body is tripped constantly at a staccato rate. The head moves up, down, sideways, in the needs of sight and utility. It poises to hammer a seed held between its tiny black toes and claws. It rounds the branch of a pine, ready for the next find, wonderfully resourceful in the game of survival; with a serious intent, gay in action, employing every second with such thoroughness as to be completely careless of the outcome of life, and so perhaps to surpass it. The mourning doves, whose low coos I mistook for an owl’s when I first heard them, are another of our permanent residents, not often at the bird feeder, but fairly ready visitors when they overcome their initial fear. One flies in, wings whistling wildly, hesitates, turns back, makes another foray, then waits in a shad tree thirty feet away, head bobbing, eyes blinking against the sharp sunlight. When a mourning dove flies up it shows a blue in its generally buff-colored feathers like a blue evening mist after winter rain. It walks with pigeonlike head bobbing back and forth, its thin tail standing out behind a tear-shaped body like the shaft of a cart, then spreading round and wide at the tip when the bird flies off. While the sturdy chickadees carry on business as usual, the dove, in gentle alarm, waits for an hour or two before hunger drives it back to stay and feed; and not long after that another dove flies in to join it.