FELT-MAKING BIRDS. 83 
nest to the extremity of a tender twig, but makes 
one more advance to safety by fixing it to the leaf 
itself. It picks up a dead leaf and sews it to the side 
of a living one, its slender bill being its needle, and 
its thread some fine fibres; the lining consists of 
feathers, gossamer, and down; its eggs are white; 
the colour of the bird light yellow; its length three 
inches ; its weight three sixteenths of an ounce; so 
that the materials of the nest and the weight of the 
bird are not likely to draw down a habitation so 
slightly suspended.” 

CHAPTER VIII. 
FELT-MAKING BIRDS. 
Tue resemblance of the texture of some of the 
more elegant nests of small birds to that of a hat or 
a piece of double-milled woollen cloth, may not 
have struck many of our readers, because the most 
compact of the nests alluded to feel loose when 
compared with a hat or a piece of thick cloth. But, 
when closely examined, the materials will be found 
arranged in a very similar manner, being, as it were, 
carded into one another, and not interwoven thread 
by thread or hair by hair, as we have described to 
be the case with the nests of basket-making and 
weaver birds. 
The indispensable substance in all these nests, 
how different soever they may be in the outward 
materials, is fine wool, with which the moss, lichen, 
spiders’ nests, tufts of cotton, or bark scales, are 
carefully and neatly felted into a texture of wonder- 
ful uniformity. The wool, of course, is the material 
by which this is effected, no other substance which 
the bird could select being capable of matting so 
