Rabbits are great depredators in fields, gardens, and plantations, destroying in very wantonness hundreds of plants which they do not care to eat. They do great damage to young trees, stripping them of their tender bark, as far up as they can reach while standing on their hind feet. Sometimes they eat the bark, but in many cases they leave it in heaps upon the ground, having chiseled it from the tree merely for the sake of exercising their teeth and keeping them in good order.
It is true that most Rabbits burrow in the ground, their burrows having many devious ramifications, but the Cottontail usually makes his home in a little dug-out, concealed under a bush or a tuft of grass.

We remember one of these little excavations which we found in a cemetery concealed by the overhanging branches of a rosebush at the foot of a grave. While reading the inscription on the tombstone we were startled by a quick rush from the bush, and discovering the nest, in which there were five tiny young with wide open eyes, we took them up tenderly and carried them home. We too, were young then. Admonished that we had cruelly deprived a mother of her offspring, and that our duty was to return them to her, we unwillingly obeyed, and put them back in the little cavern. They huddled together once more and no doubt were soon welcomed by their parents.

A frosty Saturday morning, a light snow covering the ground, a common cur dog, Cottontail tracks, and a small, happy boy. Do you not see yourself as in a vision?

DOWN in Mexico there lives a Woodpecker who stores his nuts and acorns in the hollow stalks of the yuccas and magueys. These hollow stalks are separated by joints into several cavities, and the sagacious bird has somehow found this out, and bores a hole at the upper end of each joint and another at the lower, through which to extract the acorns when wanted. Then it fills up the stalks solidly and leaves its stores there until needed, safe from the depredations of any thievish bird or four-footed animal.

The first place in which this curious habit was observed was on a hill in the midst of a desert. The hill was covered with yuccas and magueys, but the nearest oak trees were thirty miles away, and so it was calculated, these industrious birds had to make a flight of sixty miles for each acorn stowed thus in the stalks!

An observer of birds remarks: "There are several strange features to be noticed in these facts: the provident instinct which prompts this bird to lay by stores of provisions for the winter, the great distance traversed to collect a kind of food so unusual for its race, and its seeking in a place so remote from its natural abode a storehouse so remarkable."

Can instinct alone teach, or have experience and reason taught these birds that, far better than the bark of trees or crevices in rocks or any other hiding place are these hidden cavities they make for themselves with the hollow stems of distant plants?

This we cannot answer. But we do know that one of the most remarkable birds in our country is this California Woodpecker, and that he is well entitled to his Mexican name of el carpintero — the carpenter bird. — Exchange.