6 BIRD LIFE GLIMPSES 



a certain projecting stump or knob of a vine, as a 

 roosting-place. For a week or two they were con- 

 stant to this, but, after that, I found them roosting 

 somewhere else, and they have now made use, for 

 a time, of some half-dozen places, coming back to 

 their first choice in due course, and leaving it again 

 for one of their subsequent ones. Part of this 

 process I have noticed with some long-tailed tits, 

 which, for a night or two, slept all together, not only 

 in the same bush but on the same spray of it. 

 Then, just like the parrakeets, they left it, but I 

 was not able to follow them beyond this. It would 

 seem, therefore, that birds, though they do not 

 sleep anywhere, but have a bedroom, like us, yet 

 like variety, in respect of one, within reasonable 

 limits, and go " from the blue bed to the brown." 



Pheasants are sometimes very noisy and sometimes 

 quite silent in roosting, and this is just one of those 

 differences which might be thought to depend on 

 the weather. For some time it seemed to me as if 

 a sudden sharp frost, or a fall of snow, made the 

 birds clamorous, but hardly had I got this fixed, 

 as a rule, in my mind, when there came a flagrant 

 contradiction of it, and such contradictions were 

 soon as numerous as the supporting illustrations. 

 I noticed, too, that on the most vociferous nights 

 some birds would be silent, whilst even on the most 

 silent ones, one or two were sure to be noisy, so that 

 I soon came to think that if their conduct in this 

 respect did not depend, purely, on personal caprice, 

 it at least depended on something beyond one's 

 power of finding out. The cries of all sorts of birds 

 are supposed to have something to do with the 



