234 BIRD WATCHING 



wings. When the tips of these strike amongst the 

 bunches of needles, a sharp, thin, vibratory rattle is 

 produced — also a very noticeable sound. 



" The nut-hatch — or another one — now flies in again, 

 uttering, as he arrives, a curious, high, sharp note — 

 * zitch, zitch, zitch ' — and again flies away with a thin 

 brown flake in his bill, a very woody morsel it would 

 seem. And now, later in the afternoon, I see a great- 

 tit probing the cones with his bill, and he also pulls 

 out a brown flake and flies away with it. Another 

 does the same, hanging from the tip of a cone, on 

 which he afterwards perches for a moment, before 

 flying with it to another tree. Whilst standing, all 

 this time, in the tree, I had noticed little hard brown 

 seeds about the size of apple-pips, and which had all 

 been cracked, lying in the forks formed by the junction 

 of the branches with the trunk. There was hardly 

 one such resting-place in which there were not a few 

 of these cracked seeds. Pulling off a fir-cone, I began 

 to pull it to pieces, and at once saw, at the base of 

 every club where it had joined and helped to form the 

 central pillar, the double indentation, one on either 

 side of the median line — or mid-rib as it would be 

 called in a true leaf — in which the two seeds had been 

 lying. Soon I came upon a seed itself, and, attached 

 to the outer end of it — that farthest from the base of 

 the club — I at once recognised the little brown flaky 

 leaf that I had seen in the bills of all three birds, but 

 which none of them seemed to eat. 



" Here, then, the whole mystery — for to my ignor- 

 ance it had been such — was explained. The birds were 

 picking out the seeds from the cone, and the way to 

 do this was to seize the thin brown flake to which the 



