WHITE-THROATED SPARROW.
(Zonotrichia albicollis.)
About Life-size.
FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES.
The nest, too, is a neat creation of small roots, coarse grass, bark and moss and lined with a bedding of fine grass and moss. It is usually placed on the ground in fields or open woods, where it is protected by the taller grasses. Sometimes, however, low bushes or the lower branches of trees are selected. So careful is the White-Throat in the constructing of its nest not to disturb the surrounding vegetation, and so neutral is the color of the material used, that one may hunt for a long time without finding it unless he luckily stumbles upon it.
A PLANT THAT MELTS ICE.
To say that a plant can melt ice is to assert a miracle seemingly too great for even Nature’s powers to compass, but a traveler lately returned from the Alps has witnessed this wonderful phenomenon, while Grant Allen and other authorities confirm the fact that the Alpine Soldanella melts for its blossom a passage through the ice by power of its own internal heat.
The majority of tourists visit the Alps in August; therefore they miss a rare sight, that of a daring little shrub opening its fringed blue buds in the very middle of the snow sheet, and often showing its slender head above a layer of ice, in the most incredible fashion.
We may regard the Alps as unpeopled solitudes, but to Alpine plants they are a veritable world of competing life types.
Those only fitted for the struggle survive.
The botanists tell us that the Soldanella is heavily handicapped in the race. In the first place, it is obliged to eke out a livelihood in the mountain belt just below the snow line; further, it is a very low growing variety, and is quickly obscured and overtopped by the dense and rapid growth of its taller rivals; hence its anxiety to seize its one chance in life at the earliest possible moment.
To attain the end of its being, the perpetuation of its species, it must steal a march upon its companions, as it were, and show itself while they are still locked in sleep, and when its insect fertilizers, fresh from their cocoons, can see and visit it.