OUR WINTER BIRDS. 135 
uncommon, and at night of secreting themselves in small 
holes where the owls cannot get at them. This is also true 
of the small spotted woodpeckers, which, nevertheless, are 
very inconspicuous objects upon the dead and white trunks 
they frequent. 
The brown and white streaks of the creeper (Certhia 
americana), however, seem to me to furnish a decided case 
of protective colors in plumage, since they harmonize so 
exactly with the rough, cracked bark along which the 
ereeper glides, that the wee bird is hardly to be followed 
by the eye at a moderate distance. Again, no coat would 
better help the wren to scout unobserved about the tangled 
thickets and through the piles of wind-drifted leaves in 
and out of this and that shadowy crevice than the plain 
brown one he wears; while the lighter tints of the gold- 
finch’s livery are precisely those which agree with the rus- 
set weeds and grass whose harvest he diligently gathers. 
The group of exclusively boreal birds seems especially pro- 
tected from harm by the correspondence of their coat and 
their surroundings. Their home is among the evergreens, 
where an occasional dead branch or withered stem relieves 
the verdancy with yellowish patches, and the thick-hanging 
cones dot the tree with spots of reddish-brown; their plu- 
mage is mottled with green, tints of yellow and brown, an 
