He takes refuge at such times in the
smilax-thickets, whose dense, matted covering leaves an open
feeding-ground below. But a snowy winter always tells upon their
numbers in any neighborhood. Whole coveys are said to have been found
dead, frozen stiff, under the bush where they had huddled together for
warmth; and even before this extremity, their hardships lay them open
to their enemies, and the fox and the weasel, and the farmer's boy
with his box-trap, destroy them by wholesale. The deep snows of 1856
and 1857 have nearly exterminated them hereabouts; and I was told at
Vergennes, in Vermont, that there were quails there many years ago,
but that they had now entirely disappeared.
The appearance and disappearance of species within our experience
teach us that Nature's lists are not filled once for all, but that the
changes which geology shows in past ages continue into the
present. Sometimes we can trace the immediate cause, or rather
occasion, as in the case of the quail's congeners, the pinnated
grouse, and the wild turkey, both of them inhabitants of all parts of
the State in the early times.
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