64 THE NUTHATCH. 



Now is the only time to ascertain the short- 

 winged summer birds : for, when the leaf is out, 

 there is no making any remarks on such a restless 

 tribe ; and, when once the young begin to appear, 



him into a large cage with a common lark. The wound did 

 not in the least diminish his activity, nor yet his pugnacity, 

 for he instantly began to investigate all means of escape ; he 

 tried the bores, then tapped the woodwork of the cage, and 

 produced a knocking sound which made the room re-echo; 

 but after rinding his efforts vain, he then turned upon the lark, 

 ran under him with his gaping beak to bite, and effectually 

 alarmed his far more gentle and elegant antagonist. Com- 

 pelled to separate them, the nuthatch for this bird I 

 discovered him to be, by turning over the leaves of an 

 Ornithologia was put into a smaller cage of plain oak 

 wood and wire. Here he remained all night, and the next 

 morning his knocking, or tapping with his beak, was the first 

 sound I heard, though sleeping in an apartment divided- from 

 the other by a landing-place. He had food given to him, 

 minced chicken and bread crumbs, and water. He ate and 

 drank with a most perfect impudence, and the moment he 

 had satisfied himself, turned again to his work of battering 

 the frame of his cage, the sound from which, both in loudness 

 and prolongation of noise, is only to be compared to the 

 efforts of a fashionable footman, upon a fashionable door, in 

 a fashionable square. He had a particular fancy for the 

 extremities of the corner pillars of the cage ; on these he 

 spent his most elaborate taps, and, at this moment, though he 

 only occupied the cage a day, the wood is pierced and worn 

 like a piece of old worm-eaten timber. He probably had an 

 idea, that if these main-beams could once be penetrated, the 

 rest of the superstructure would fall, and free him. Against the 

 doorway he had also a particular spite, and once succeeded 

 in opening it; and when, to interpose a farther obstacle, it 

 was tied in a double knot with a string, the perpetual appli- 

 cation of his beak quickly unloosed it. In ordinary cages, a 

 circular hole is left in the wire for the bird to insert his head 

 to drink from a glass ; to this hole the nuthatch constantly 

 repaired, not for the purpose of drinking, but to try to push 

 out more than his head ; but in vain, for he is a thick bird, 

 and rather heavily built ; but the instant he found the hole too 

 small, he would withdraw his head, and begin to dig and 



