SALLY THE HOUSE WREN 303 



and nothing delighted Uncle Dave more than to call 

 ^^Sally/' and have her fly around his head and scold. 



Sally, like all of her tribe, was a tireless worker. When 

 nesting time came she seemed to carry sticks for the pure 

 pleasure of it. She would fill holes that would hold a 

 peck or more with sticks without paying the least attention 

 to the order in which they were placed, even though she 

 finally built her nest in a different place entirely. There 

 were many osage orange (bois d'arc) hedges in the coun- 

 try, and Sally gathered the thorny twigs that had been 

 trimmed from these hedges the previous year. These 

 sticks were never less than six inches long, and often she 

 would carry pieces eight or ten inches long. Her nest 

 was usually constructed almost entirely of these thorny 

 sticks and was eight or ten inches in diameter and four 

 or five inches deep. When this huge pile of sticks was 

 in shape she carried straws, dry grass, and hairs and built 

 rather a large nest of these inside of the stick nest. She 

 finished with a lining of feathers gathered from the poul- 

 try yard. The nest was so built that the sticks covered 

 the top as well as the bottom, leaving only a small hole for 

 entering. 



Sally nested in this well house for seven years and there 

 Were few available spots in it where she had not piled 

 sticks some time or other, though in the end the old nest 

 was usually repaired and used again. I became so inter- 

 ested in her that I determined to have some wrens of my 

 own. So I found two or three bleaching horseheads which 

 I put in trees in various parts of the yard, and every year 

 a pair of wrens nested in each of these skulls. The hole 

 where the spinal cord had entered the head was used as an 

 entrance and the nest was built where the brain had been. 



