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 mike 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 th? 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 caU-note is a simple ' chip, chip ', which often betrays 

 its vicinity when it is itself concealed from sight. Its proper song 

 is fuU, loud, clear, and powerful, rapidly executed and terminating 

 m 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- 

 (dination 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. MacgiUivray, however, performed the task, and 

 furnished him with a most satisfactory detailed account of what 

 passed under his obser\'ation. 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 



' I have heard the same musical contest in August. 



