124 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
in this hurried, almost frantic way. You have 
also sometimes made comic pictures when you 
least intended such things! Here is a bird’s 
bill and a quick firm curve for the back of its 
head; the rest of the sketch flew away with the 
original. On the next page stands a fly-catcher, 
on one leg, minus a wing and having only the 
hint of a tail; but you have preserved the 
characteristic attitude, and the sketch is valua- 
ble. You can work it up at your leisure. 
Here is a pine-woodpecker, a pretty fair out- 
line, but there is no sign of an eye in the bird’s 
head and its feet grasp thin air. All these 
notes, however burried and uncertain, are 
reminders of what your eyes have seen, bring- 
ing up at once vivid pictures of the gay wild 
things which have flitted before you. 
Sometimes a bird will be exceedingly ac- 
commodating. I recall now how one day I 
crept, under cover of a tuft of wild sedge grass, 
to within thirty feet of a log-cock (//y/otamus 
pileatus), and worked out a most satisfactory 
study, while it was quietly eating winged ants, 
as they poured from a hole it had pecked in a 
rotten stump. 
The yellow-billed cuckoo is a very difficult 
bird to sketch, so shy and sly and so restless. 
You will hear his queer, throbbing note in 
some lone place, and you will slip along 
hoping to see him. When you have nearly 
reached the spot, lo, he has eluded you, and 
his mournful voice caws out from deeper 
shades further off among the tangled trees. 
The wood-thrush and hermit-thrush are equally 
evasive. By the way, Wilson claims that 
the hermit-thrush is mute. I am sure this 
is an error, One day while I lay in a cane- 
