BIRDS IN THE GREENWOODS 239 



others, this one gave me the best and longest view, 

 and the only one of the descent. Had he fluttered 

 in the ascent also, I must certainly have noted it, 

 and I should not, then, have placed the two in such 

 contradistinction. If an inference may be drawn 

 from such limited observation, it, perhaps, is that this 

 bird is in process of acquiring, or, at any rate, of 

 perfecting, a habit, and that, therefore, all the indivi- 

 duals do not excel in it to an equal degree. The 

 fact that I often watched and waited to see them 

 practising the art again, but without success, may 

 lend some colour to this. There was clinging some- 

 times, but not climbing." 



In this competition, therefore, between the wren 

 and the tit as tree-creepers, the tit bears off the bell ; 

 but later I had a better opportunity of observing the 

 prowess of the latter bird, and, though I did not see 

 it descend, yet in ease and deftness, length of time 

 during which the part was assumed, and general 

 fidelity of the understudy to the original, it must, 

 I think, be pronounced the superior. It was early 

 on a cold, rainy, cheerless morning towards the end 

 of February, that I was so lucky as not to be in bed. 

 I say — " Have, this morning, watched closely, and 

 from quite near, a wren behaving just like a profes- 

 sional tree-creeper. It ascended the trunk of an alder, 

 quickly and easily, and sometimes to a considerable 

 height — twenty or thirty feet perhaps — beginning from 

 the roots, and then flew down to the roots or base 

 of the next one, and so on along a whole line of them. 

 Up the sloping roots, or anywhere at all horizontal, 

 it hopped along in the usual manner, but, when the 

 trunk became perpendicular, it crept or crawled, just 



