28 Forest Birds. 
captures these insects with its beak. It has no 
barbed tongue like the woodpecker, but the long, . 
curved beak (measuring about the length of the 
head itself) is thrust into the crevice of the bark to 
extract the lurking insect. The Creeper is silent in 
its work—a characteristic attributable in a great 
measure to the formation of its beak (Fig. 8), which 
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Fie. 7. 
Tail of Nuthatch. 
From nature. Natural size. 
is too slender to be used for tapping the trees, or 
removing the bark. Neither has it a loud voice, 
like the woodpecker, to wake the stillness of the 
wood, for its note is soft and shrill, resembling the 
syllables twee-twee, and this is rarely uttered save 
as a call note to its mate. 
It will be seen in the accompanying plate, 
that the bird on the left assumes in general outline 
