INDEPENDENT BIRDS 19 



to a mouse. No wood with rough-barked trees is 

 without it, and no human analogy can describe its 

 laborious activity there. Watch it alight at the 

 foot of a tree trunk. It has scarcely touched 

 the bark when its spiral ascent begins. Creeping 

 round the trunk and upward it searches every 

 cavity with sensitive bill, pulling from their recesses 

 the larvse of small insects, and apparently getting 

 little reward for a great deal of labour. Up 

 it goes till the smooth bark near the top 

 is reached, when it drops with the swiftness of 

 a stone and the lightness of a feather to the 

 foot of the next bole, where the spiral pursuit 

 begins again. From daybreak to dusk never a 

 moment is squandered, for life is very exacting 

 in the winter woods. Both the gold-crest and 

 the creeper have, however, the reward of their 

 independence, for the natural supplies on which 

 they rely, if scanty, have none of the precarious - 

 ness of charity, and rare thing among the smaller 

 birds of Britain both species are, with the exten- 

 sion of woodlands, steadily on the increase. 



Few of the finches disdain the human aid offered 

 by, at any rate, the farmyard. Even the brambling 

 comes down from the heights and joins the goodly 

 company of sparrows, linnets, larks, chaffinches, 

 greenfinches, and buntings which seek at once the 

 shelter and the stores of the hospitable cornstacks. 

 But the siskin is a notable exception. No matter 

 how deep the snow, how hard the frost, or fierce 

 the wind, this little green finch pins its reliance 

 to the alder-trees which fringe the river. The 

 alder catkins are now hardened into cones, but 



