To-day I saw a sharp-shinned hawk, hunting noiselessly, no doubt for these same sparrows. He flitted among the treetops like a nervous flash of slaty gray, and was gone so quickly that had I not heard the welt of his wing tips on the resisting air as he turned a sharp corner I should never have seen him. Most of our hawks, though well known to take an occasional chicken, are mouse and grasshopper eaters. The sharp-shinned is the real chicken hawk, for he eats more birds than anything else, though the small songsters of the thicket form the greater part of his diet. I have rarely seen him here in winter, though his summer nest is common in the deep woods, with its cream-buff eggs heavily blotched with chocolate brown. Just as the plenitude of food of their kind kept the song sparrows with us to enjoy the mild weather, so I think the multitude of song sparrows and other succulent titbits made the sharp-shinned hawk willing to winter where he had summered. All these birds which are wintering as far north as they dare seem to come out and cheer up in the April-like days, but in those which are distinctly January you may tramp the woods for days and not see one of them. The flicker is a rather common bird with us the winter through. In a warm January rain you will often surprise him wandering about in the thawed fields, looking for iced crickets and half concealed grubs and chrysalids among the stubble. Let the snow come deep and the wind blow out of the north and the flicker vanishes from the landscape. It is as if he had gone into a hole and pulled his thirty-six nicknames in after him, so completely has the flicker disappeared. He is a strong-winged bird and I have always been willing to think that at such times he simply whirled aloft on the northerly gale and never lighted till he was a few hundred miles to the south. He could do it easily enough. He would find bare ground and good feeding in the tidewater country of Virginia when New England is three feet under snow and the zero gales are drifting it deeper and freezing the heart out of the very trees in the wood. The other day, though, I caught one of them sitting in the hollow of an ancient apple tree. There was an opening of some size facing the south into which the midday sun shone with refreshing warmth. Here, sheltered from the bite of the north wind the flicker had tucked himself away and was enjoying his sunny nook much as pigeons do in just the right angle of the city cornices. But he was better off than the pigeons for there were fat grubs in the decaying wood that formed his shelter and he could use his meal ticket without leaving his lodgings. Our woods are full of such hostelries and they shelter more of the woodland creatures than we know as we tramp carelessly by.