WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD 



neglecting his own, this little bobbing bunch of 

 brown excitement is the very spirit of impudence. 



The wren does not confine himself altogether to 

 the garden, however. You may find him every- 

 where in the woods, and few species are equal to 

 this in the number of individuals. An old stump 

 that is too soft for the woodpeckers, or the hollow, 

 broken limb of a tree that the winds have demol- 

 ished, is his chosen home. Into a hole somewhere 

 he stuffs a large quantity of twigs, some of them 

 of astonishing size when we think how small a 

 bird handles them. In the centre of this mass is 

 a soft chamber, wherein six or seven brick-dust- 

 colored eggs are hatched late in May. It is a nest 

 which justifies his generic name. Troglodytes, and 

 so fond of his queer den is he, and so restlessly 

 active, that, when his proper home is finished, he 

 packs full of rubbish half the crevices in the vicin- 

 ity, out of a sheer want of some better way to oc- 

 cupy his time and ease his energy. 



There is one component of this nest w^hich is also 

 used by the vireos and gnat-catchers — namely, 

 round pellets of a white, cottony substance, the 

 nature of which I was puzzled to determine. At 

 last I caught the birds collecting it, and found it 

 to be a minute fungus which covers dead twigs 



127 



