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again, trying to make it to the blind before the first hints of daylight.
    A crust of ice had formed on the twigs from an early morning rain. When I settled back into the blind to resume the watch on bird Number 837, I heard the soft tinkling of the iced branches as dawn approached with a slight breeze, punctuated by the soft, dull, rhythmic tapping of a downy woodpecker somewhere behind me.
    The radio signal from Number 837 still came from the pine grove by the lake where she had ended up the night before. What a welcomesound to hear her strong signal and the swoosh of her wing-beats at 7:15 A.M. ! She arrived alone and silent, hopped from branch to branch, descended to the meat pile, and as with the day before, immediately began to feast on fat. She spent the next four hours making food caches. Unlike the previous day, she usually flew rather than walked to many of her cache sites, although her radio signal indicated she didn’t fly far. As expected, no crowd of birds came. I started to lose some of my enthusiasm. The cold was gnawing at my feet.
    Things picked up at around 11:00, when a pair (the pair from yesterday?) finally returned. I suspected that their territory, or their main feeding site at this time, was distant, since they arrived so late. The male gave a long series of undulating territorial quorks , and his mate gave slow measured knocks in series of three— knock, knock, knock—knock, knock, knock . Number 837 then disappeared from sight for three and a half hours, but from her radio signal I knew that she was still in the nearby forest. I heard her beg a number of times—indicating that she was being aggressively confronted by another bird.
    At 2:30 P.M. , it began to rain harder. The thick fir boughs of my blind held out the light, but they did not hold out water. I was thankful when it soon got dark and was time to go home. The adults had left long ago, but 837 still remained nearby in the woods.
    I again stopped by to see John up in his tall spruce tree. He told me that the birds had again regrouped nearby, after coming from the same direction as yesterday. Our bird was sleeping separately from the crowd, at the same place she’d slept last night. We thought she might recruit the next day, if she found the roost, because she couldn’t eat alone due to the resident pair.
    Once in the blind the next dawn, I got out a flashlight, adjusted the antenna and dials of the radio receiver, and took my first reading. Our bird was still where she had slept. Good, I had made it up before she did. By 7:00 A.M. , she was gone, and I lost all radio contact.
    I waited for what seemed like an hour, then maybe another hour, but still nothing. I had no idea what would happen, which added a welcome element of excitement. The bird could come at any second, or not at all. Perhaps she had joined another group and was nowtwenty miles away in one of any number of directions, feeding at a moose carcass on Tumbledown, loitering at the Dryden dump, or at a coyote bait put out by hunters. Maybe the pair would come to feed. Maybe a new bird would discover the bait. This was no longer an experiment, because too many variables had already crept in, and we could not control any of then.
    She finally returned, silent and alone, and she fed—fat only, although there was plenty of muscle meat—as if she hadn’t eaten in three days. In between snacks, she cached food. The first three caches were within ten feet of the huge bait pile itself.
    About an hour later, her food caching came to an abrupt halt when the territorial pair returned. And when they arrived, you knew it! Before, there had been total silence. Now there was constant calling. Number 837 managed to give several “yells,” but the pair aggressively flew after her and she fell silent. The pair continued their deep, resonant, rapid-succession short quorks that said, “Get the hell away,” and they also made the long, undulating territorial quorks that said, “I’m