By the very poor snow is regarded as among the most terrible calamities
of life. Many types of countrymen, rural publicans, postmen, outdoor
labourers, and small traders, speak of snow as the worst of all
possible weather, leaving the most serious after-effects. And snow
means calamity to many wild things. Lucky are the robins of a garden
who have a friend to stir the old hot-bed, and turn up the worms from
beneath the frozen top-soil; happy the grain-feeding birds who find
a rick that has been threshed. Thousands flock to the corn-ricks,
and there is food for all--pheasants, partridges, rooks, jackdaws,
starlings, sparrows, greenfinches, chaffinches, yellow-hammers, and
the bramble-finches, orange, white, and black in plumage. To the
holly-trees come the starving thrushes, and in hard weather even the
fieldfares will lose their extreme shyness to besiege a holly-tree
beside a door. The more delicate redwings die in thousands, though the
dying and dead are seldom seen.
To a few the snow means profit--for the hawks there is a carnival of
feasting, and the fox finds weak and hungry hares and rabbits an easy
prey, if ill-nourished on a diet of tree-bark and withered herbage. As
to the pheasants, they are well cared for--and the keeper, in snowy
weather, scatters his maize with a liberal hand.
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