50 . THE WREN 
The true story of the Wren is simple enough. It is a minute 
bird of unpretending plumage, distinguished easily by its erect 
tail and its habit of hiding in bushes and hedges, not clinging like 
the Creeper to the perpendicular or horizontal bough of a tree, but 
hopping from twig to twig, and occasionally taking a short direct 
flight to another place of concealment, but rarely exposing itself 
by doing more than this. When hunting for its food, which is 
considered to be almost exclusively insects, it searches diligently 
holes and crannies of all kinds, and in all substances. I have 
known one make its way habitually through a zinc pipe into a 
greenhouse, and do much service there by picking aphides from 
the slender stalks of herbaceous plants, which bent into the form 
of an arch under even its trifling weight. While thus occupied it 
has suffered me to come within arm’s length, but has taken no 
notice of me. Generally, it displays little fear of man?; but, though 
in winter it resorts to the neighbourhood of houses in quest of 
food, it shows no disposition, like the Redbreast, to enter on terms 
of intimacy, nor is it sociable either with its own kind or other 
birds. Its call-note is a simple ‘ chip, chip’, which often betrays 
its vicinity when it is itself concealed from sight. Its proper song 
is full, loud, clear, and powerful, rapidly executed and terminating 
in a trill or shake, followed by two or three unimportant notes. 
This it utters occasionally in autumn and winter. About the middle 
of March the song of the Wren is among the most frequent sounds 
of the country. At this season one may often hear in a garden 
the roundelay of a Wren poured forth from the concealment of a 
low shrub; and, immediately that it is completed, a precisely 
similar lay bursts forth from another bush some twenty yards off. 
No sooner is this ended than it is answered, and so the vocal duel 
proceeds, the birds never interfering with each other’s song, but 
uttering in turns the same combinations and arrangement of notes, 
just as if they were reading off copies of a score printed from the 
same type. 
But the season is coming on when the Wren has to be occupied 
with other things than singing down a rival. Nest-making is with 
this bird something more than the laying of a few sticks across 
one another. It is not every one who has at once the time, the in- 
clination and the steadiness of purpose to watch, from beginning © 
to end, the completion of a Wren’s nest. To most people, one or 
other of these qualifications is wanting, and to not a few all three. 
A friend of Mr. Macgillivray, however, performed the task, and 
furnished him with a most satisfactory detailed account of what 
passed under his observation. The nest was commenced at seven 
o’clock in the morning of the thirtieth of May, by the female bird’s 
placing the decayed leaf of a lime-tree in the cleft of a Spanish 
4] have heard the same musical contest in August, 
