Look at these odd little black and white spiders. How jerkily they run; never moving more than an inch or so at a time, then stopping to rest, and then generally darting off again in a different direction. They are hunting-spiders, and are so called because they hunt for insects instead of trying to catch them in a web. You may see one of these spiders "stalking" a fly very much as a cat creeps up to a bird, and then suddenly springing upon it and leaping into the air with its victim firm in its grip.
Slowly the days grow shorter, the rains come more frequently, flowers wither, and the herbage shrivels. Insects die off, the birds one by one disappear quietly, or gather in flocks to journey southward, and the woods grow quiet and gray.
IV
WINTER
As we look out of the window on a landscape of snow, or of half-bare earth, frozen roads, and leafless trees, the world seems lifeless. But one who starts out for a walk, anxious to discover whether all nature is really dead, will soon find that it is very much alive, though much of it is buried in slumber. Let us test it.
As we take the well-accustomed path we cannot but contrast the bareness and silence with the activity and color and cheerful noise about us when a few weeks ago we strolled this way. The thought saddens and discourages us a little, when suddenly there comes to our ears
"Chick-chick-a-dee-dee! Saucy note,
Out of sound heart and merry throat,
As if it said: 'Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places
Where January brings few faces.'"
There is the singer—half a dozen of them in fact—fluffy little gray, black-capped birds not much bigger than a man's thumb, dodging busily about the limbs of that old apple-tree, swinging with desperate clutch at the tip of a twig, hanging head downward to get at a morsel on the under side of the bough, and chattering all the time as though cold weather were no hardship at all.
What do they find to eat? Keep your eyes on one, and see if you cannot guess. He is pecking here and there at the bark, and swallowing something so minute we cannot recognize it. But do you not remember how, last summer, we watched the procession of ants climbing this very tree to get honey from a "herd" of aphids on the branches? Those bark-lice are still there, each hidden under a sort of scale, like a winter blanket; and it is these that the chickadees are pulling off and eating. It takes a great many of them to make a meal, and the birds must keep very busy. Perhaps that is one reason why they seem so happy. A busy person is usually a cheerful one.
When you meet a winter group of these merry tomtits it is well to wait quietly for a little while, since you are pretty sure to find others following them. There! do you hear that sharp tapping? Turn your head and you will see a small woodpecker with its checkered black and white coat, and a broad white stripe down the back, hewing away at the thick bark of that oak. He is tremendously in earnest, and let us hope he finds a good fat grub.
Gliding down the next tree-trunk comes something which for an instant we take for a mouse—it is so bluish and furtive; but it is a bird—a nuthatch—which has a straight slender bill almost like a woodpecker's, and which digs into the cracks and crannies for eggs and hiding grubs of small insects, now and then smashing a thin-shelled acorn for the wormy meal it contains, or tearing to pieces the fuzzy cocoon of a tussock-moth. It has an odd habit of working almost always head downward, and now and then lifts its head and squeaks out a sharp nee-nee-nee, as though it said "Never-mind-me. 'Tain't cold!"