THE COAL TIT. 35 



and seemed to suffer no inconvenience from the severity 

 of the weather. 



But it was otherwise as regards the Coal Tits, which, 

 contrary to what might have been expected, felt the cold 

 so much that one morning, after an exceptionally hard 

 frost I found one of them dead and the other in such a 

 benumbed condition that it soon followed its companion 

 to the "happy hunting-grounds" of its race, where 

 bird-catchers cease from troubling and Coal Tits are left 

 in peace. 



Undeterred by my unfortunate experience with the 

 first pair, I subsequently, in the following spring, I think, 

 obtained some more of them, but upon detecting one of 

 these in the very act of sucking the egg of a Silverbill, 

 I caught the naughty little couple and restored them 

 to an ill-deserved liberty in the private wood on the 

 opposite side of the Common to where I then lived, 

 and there they passed the summer, in all probability; 

 and perhaps the pair I saw in my elm-tree at the 

 beginning of the following winter may have been the 

 same; but of course that is only a surmise, and I 

 cannot be positive as to their identity. 



On the whole I have arrived at the conclusion that 

 the Coal Tit is not a suitable companion for other birds 

 in a confined space, unless perhaps for the members 

 of its own family, with whom it appears to agree fairly 

 well; but it should certainly not be located with the 

 delicate little Waxbills: these are utterly unable to cope 



