WHITE-BELLIED NUTHATCH. 108 
school-children starting out with baskets and pails 
on a holiday. Watch them now! What clumsy 
work they make of it, trying to cling to the 
beechnut burr and get the nuts out at the same 
time. It’s a pity the chickadee can’t give them 
a few lessons! They might better have kept to 
their tree trunks. But they persist, and after 
tumbling off from several burrs, finally snatch 
out a nut and fly off with it as calmly as if they 
had been dancing about among the twigs all their 
days. Away they go till they come to a maple or 
some other rough-barked tree, when they stick 
the nut in between the ridges of the bark, ham- 
mer it down, and then, when it is so tightly 
wedged that the slippery shell cannot get away 
from them, by a few sharp blows they hatch the 
nut from the tree! Through my glass I watched 
a number of them this fall, and they all worked 
in about the same way, though some of them 
wedged their nuts far into cracks or holes in the 
body of the tree, instead of in the bark. One of 
them pounded so hard he spread his tail and al- 
most upset himself. The fun was so great a 
downy woodpecker tried it, and of all the big 
school-boys! The excitement seemed to turn his 
head, and he attacked a beechnut burr as if he 
would close with it in mortal combat ! 
Though without any real song, the nuthatch 
has a delightful variety of notes. In May his 
nasal henk-a, henk-a, henk-a, comes through the 
