210 W. BICKEETON NOTES ON BIRDS 



of tits are " tomtits " to the uninitiated, so that the exact species 

 is not recorded. Probably it was the blue tit (Parus ceeruleus). 



Tree-Creeper {Certhia familiar is). — In my notes of last year 

 I stated as follows : — " In 1902 I reported on the then increasing 

 scarcity of this attractive little bird. I regret that I cannot now, 

 after three years' further obsei'\'ation, report any increase in its 

 numbers so far as the Watford district is concerned. In fact, it 

 seems to get more and more scarce each year. I have only seen 

 three during the year." I think these remarks must, in some 

 mysterious way, have gone the round of all the tree-creepers 

 in the Watford district, and that one and all miist have conspired 

 to resent and to refute the statement thus made against their 

 tribe. For certain it is that I have seen tree-creepers all through 

 the year, in all parts of the district, and in such numbers that 

 I had never looked upon as possible for so comparatively rare 

 a species as I had regarded this to be. I do not mean that 

 I have seen large numbers together, or at once, for tree-creepers 

 are anything but sociable birds, and one never sees more than 

 one or two at a time. But I have seen them almost on every 

 ramble I have taken, and sometimes I have seen as many as 

 half a dozen on one morning's walk. And, as I happened to 

 mention in the discussion which followed my last year's paper at 

 St. Albans, I have actually had the pleasure of hearing one sing. 



This interesting little incident happened on 4th March, 1906, 

 in Cassiobury Park. I watched a pair of tree-creepers fly on to 

 one of the elms in the large cross-avenue, and time after time in 

 their upward progression round the tnink I saw and heard one 

 of them give out a bright, sweet little song that I had never 

 heard before in my life, and may probably never hear again. As 

 a matter of fact, I did not at the time realise the full significance 

 of this little incident. To mention that one has for the first 

 time in one's life heard a particular bird give forth its song may 

 perhaps strike some of you as an attempt to "magnify the 

 trivial," but in this instance, at any rate, it is not so. For when 

 I tell you that Macgillivray, the great Scots naturalist, whose 

 five-volume work on birds is one of the classics of ornithological 

 literature, never heard the tree-creeper sing ; that Mr. W. Warde 

 Fowler, of Oxford, one of the most distinguished of the field- 

 naturalists of to-day, and one of the most delightful writers 

 on birds and their ways, has only once dui'ing a long life of 

 observation heard the song of the tree-creeper ; when I tell you 

 that Dr. R. Bowdler Sharpe, head of the Bird Department at the 

 Natural History Museum at South Kensington, writes as follows 

 in his ' Handbook to the Birds of Grreat Britain ' : — " The 

 creeper has been credited with a song, and some observations 

 have recorded the fact in this coxmtry. Although we have been 

 acquainted with the species from boyhood, we have never heard 

 a tree-creeper sing in England, though the Continental birds 

 undoubtedly do sing, and we remember once hearing a bird 

 in France " ; when I add that Miss Armitt, of Eydal, who knows 



