18 IN BIRD LAND. 
this, he reached a point where the limb made an 
obtuse angle by bending obliquely downward. Now 
what would he do? Would he really hitch down 
that branch head-foremost, only for once? By no 
means. Catch him committing such a breach of 
creeper decorum! He suddenly spread his wings 
and hurled himself to the lower end of that oblique 
section of the branch, and then ambled up to the 
angle in regular orthodox fashion. You will never 
find him doing anything to give employment to the 
heresy hunters! ! 
Have any of my fellow-observers ever seen this 
merry-andrew convert himself into a whirligig? I 
once witnessed this droll performance, which seemed 
almost like a vagary. A creeper was clinging to a 
large oak-tree near the base, when he took it into 
his crazy little pate, for what earthly — or unearthly — 
reason I know not, to wheel around like a top several 
1 Some months after the foregoing had appeared in the 
columns of a popular journal I had occasion to modify one 
assertion. For many years I had been studying the creeper, 
and had never seen him descend a tree or bough head-first 
until one autumn day while loitering in the woods. A creeper 
was hitching up the stem of a sapling in his characteristic 
manner; as I drew near, he seemed to catch a glimpse of a 
tidbit in his rear, near the sapling’s root. In his extreme 
haste to secure it before I drove him away, he wheeled 
around, scuttled down over the bark head-foremost a distance 
of perhaps two feet, picked up his morsel, and then dashed 
out of sight, as if ashamed of his breach of creeper etiquette, 
probably to eat humble pie at his leisure. That was in the 
autumn of 1892. Since then no creeper, to my knowledge, 
has been guilty of a similar offence against the convenances, 
