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The next season Cuff tried the same tactics again with like success, but when the third woodchuck had taken up his abode at the fatal hole, the old churner’s wits and strength had begun to fail him, and he was baffled in each attempt to capture the animal.

The woodchuck always burrows on a sidehill. This enables him to guard against being drowned out, by making the termination of the hole higher than the entrance. He digs in slantingly for about two or three feet, then makes a sharp upward turn and keeps nearly parallel with the surface of the ground for a distance of eight or ten feet farther, according to the grade. Here he makes his nest and passes the winter, holing up in October or November and coming out again in April. This is a long sleep, and is rendered possible only by the amount of fat with which the system has become stored during the summer. The fire of life still burns, but very faintly and slowly, as with the draughts all closed and the ashes heaped up. Respiration is continued, but at longer intervals, and all the vital processes are nearly at a standstill. Dig one out during hibernation (Audubon did so), and you find it a mere inanimate ball, that suffers itself to be moved and rolled about without showing signs of awakening. But bring it in by the fire, and it presently unrolls and opens its eyes, and crawls feebly about, and if left to itself will seek some dark hole or corner, roll itself up again, and resume its former condition.

A GOOD SEASON FOR THE BIRDS

The season of 1880 seems to have been exceptionally favorable to the birds. The warm, early spring, the absence of April snows and of long, cold rains in May and June,–indeed, the exceptional heat and dryness of these months, and the freedom from violent storms and tempests throughout the summer,–all worked together for the good of the birds. Their nests were not broken up or torn from the trees, nor their young chilled and destroyed by the wet and the cold. The drenching, protracted rains that make the farmer’s seed rot or lie dormant in the ground in May or June, and the summer tempests that uproot the trees or cause them to lash and bruise their foliage, always bring disaster to the birds. As a result of our immunity from these things the past season, the small birds in the fall were perhaps never more abundant. Indeed, I never remember to have seen so many of certain kinds, notably the social and the bush sparrows. The latter literally swarmed in the fields and vineyards; and as it happened that for the first time a large number of grapes were destroyed by birds, the little sparrow, in some localities, was accused of being the depredator. But he is innocent. He never touches fruit of any kind, but lives upon seeds and insects. What attracted this sparrow to the vineyards in such numbers was mainly the covert they afforded from small hawks, and probably also the seeds of various weeds that had been allowed to ripen there. The grape-destroyer was a bird of another color, namely, the Baltimore oriole. One fruit-grower on the Hudson told me he lost at least a ton of grapes by the birds, and in the western part of New York and in Ohio and in Canada, I hear the vineyards suffered severely from the depredations of the oriole. The oriole has a sharp, dagger-like bill, and he seems to be learning rapidly how easily he can puncture fruit with it. He has come to be about the worst cherry bird we have. He takes the worm first, and then he takes the cherry the worm was after, or rather he bleeds it; as with the grapes, he carries none away with him, but wounds them all. He is welcome to all the fruit he can eat, but why should he murder every cherry on the tree, or every grape in the cluster? He is as wanton as a sheep-killing dog, that will not stop with enough, but slaughters every ewe in the flock. The oriole is peculiarly exempt from the dangers that beset most of our birds: its nest is all but impervious to the rain, and the squirrel, or the jay, or the crow cannot rob it without great difficulty. It is a pocket which it would not be prudent for either jay or squirrel to attempt to explore when the owner, with his dagger-like beak, is about; and the crow cannot alight upon the slender, swaying branch from which it is usually pendent. Hence the orioles are doubtless greatly on the increase.