This winter activity of the birds ought to be taken into account by those who accuse them of mischief-doing in summer. In winter, at least, no mischief can be done; there is no fruit to steal; and even sap-sucking, if such a practice at any time be not altogether fabulous, certainly cannot be carried on now. Nothing can be destroyed now except the farmer's enemies, or at best neutrals. Yet the birds keep at work all the time. The only bird that occurs to me as a proved sufferer from famine in the winter is the quail. This is the most limited in its range of all our birds. Not only does it not migrate, (or only exceptionally,) but it does not even wander much,--the same covey keeping all the year, and even year after year, to the same feeding-ground. Nor does it ever seek its food upon trees, like the partridge, but solely upon the ground. The quail is our nearest representative of the common barn-yard fowl. This it resembles in many respects, and among others, in its habit of going a-foot, except when the covey crosses from one feeding or roosting ground to another, or when the cock-bird mounts upon a rail-fence or stone-wall to sound his call in the spring. This persistence exposes the quail to hardship when the ground is covered with snow, and the fruit of the skunk-cabbage and all the berries and grain are inaccessible. He takes refuge at such times in the smilax-thickets, whose dense, matted covering leaves an open feeding-ground below. But a snowy winter always tells upon their numbers in any neighborhood. Whole coveys are said to have been found dead, frozen stiff, under the bush where they had huddled together for warmth; and even before this extremity, their hardships lay them open to their enemies, and the fox and the weasel, and the farmer's boy with his box-trap, destroy them by wholesale. The deep snows of 1856 and 1857 have nearly exterminated them hereabouts; and I was told at Vergennes, in Vermont, that there were quails there many years ago, but that they had now entirely disappeared.