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Updated: June 29, 2025
One day a pair of juncos appeared on the scene, mingling fraternally with the sparrows, and sharing their usual pickings around back doors and along the back fence, and white-throated sparrows showed themselves on the shrubs and small trees which overhung the division walls.
No danger of Parus bicolor coming to want or going to the poorhouse. Another day the juncos are feeding on the seeds of the foxtail or pigeon grass, in an old orchard hard by the border of the woods. Sometimes they will make a dinner of berries the kinds too that are regarded as poisonous to man eating the juicy pulp in their dainty way, and dropping the seeds and rind to the ground.
"When I was a boy here at the Farm, these white-vested Juncos were my winter pets. A flock was always sure to come in October and stay until the last of April, or even into May if the season was cold. One winter, when the snow came at Thanksgiving and did not leave the ground until March, the birds had a hard time of it, I can tell you.
Emboldened by hunger, the Starlings alight at the kitchen door, and the Juncos, Sparrows, Downy Woodpeckers, and Nuthatches come to feed on the window-sill. Jays and Meadowlarks haunt the manure piles or haystacks in search of fragments of grain. Purple Finches flock to the wahoo elm trees to feed on the buds, and Crossbills attack the pine cones.
Day after day, flocks gathered and departed: by the time the first snow whitened his trail around the Limberlost, there were left only the little black-and-white juncos, the sapsuckers, yellow-hammers, a few patriarchs among the flaming cardinals, the blue jays, the crows, and the quail. Then Freckles began his wizard work. He cleared a space of swale, and twice a day he spread a birds' banquet.
The only cannibal birds that seemed to be about were a pair of Cat Owls that spent most of the time in our hay-barn, where they paid for their lodgings by catching rats and mice. "But my flock of Juncos were determined to brave all weathers. First they ate the seeds of all the weeds and tall grasses that reached above the snow, then they cleaned the honeysuckles of their watery black berries.
Water flowing from melting snow must be ice-cold, yet the juncos plunged into the crystal pools and rinsed their plumes with as much apparent relish as if their lavatory were tepid instead of icy, and as if balmy instead of nipping winds were blowing. One day I watched a member of this family taking his dinner of wild grapes.
As you stand at the border of the woods in the gloaming you can hear the rustling of the fodder as the juncos move about in their tepees, trying to find the choicest and snuggest berths. Usually they select the tops of the standing shocks, perhaps for safety; yet some may be found also in the shocks that have partly fallen to the ground.
For two days I did not see my birds; but on the third day in the afternoon, when I was feeding the hens in the barnyard, a party of feeble, half-starved Juncos, hardly able to fly, settled down around me and began to pick at the chicken food. "I knew at a glance that after a few hours' more exposure all the poor little birds would be dead.
A light carpet of half-dried leaves had already covered the ground. The song birds in the fast yellowing, graceful willows were supplanted by silent, migratory groups of somber juncos, who fled at their approach. Here and there, they surprised a squirrel adding another peanut to his well-buried winter cache.
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