198 IN NATURE'S WAYS 



himself from dawn till dusk with tireless zeal. We 

 made a little experiment to test how many nuts a 

 single pair of these birds who live in our garden would 

 fetch, carry, crack, or hide in a day, and the total 

 amounted to nearly four hundred. Never once 

 through a long day spent in fetching and carrying 

 nuts did their energy flag. 



Sometimes we have put out on our bird-table a 

 heap made up of many different kinds of food, mixtures 

 of seeds and nuts such as are prepared for parrots, 

 mixtures of chicken and cage-bird foods, with bread, 

 meat, and suet all manner of delicacies such as birds 

 love and have hidden among this goodly feast a few 

 hazel or Spanish nuts. Then we have found that 

 when the nuthatches arrive at the board, their first 

 thought is to take the nuts before anything. Maize, 

 wheat, hemp, sunflower seeds, the kernels of foreign 

 nuts, breadcrumbs and suet these and all the goodies 

 they neglect while a nut remains, although they are 

 as willing to eat bread as sparrows, and will take many 

 kinds of seeds when the nuts are gone. 



Unless a nut is wedged fast, as in a crevice of the 

 bark of an old tree, the nuthatch usually picks it up 

 in his beak, after a few swift pecks to put it in the 

 convenient position, and flies off with it, to wedge it 

 in a vice of his own choosing, where he may break it 

 open with his bill and devour the kernel. Or if he 

 comes across a goodly supply of nuts, he proceeds to 

 fly off with them one by one, to drop them in various 

 odd corners and holes of a garden or other hiding- 

 places. Some he will deliberately plant in a border, 

 or among shoots of plants or deep in tufts of grass. 

 First he puts down the nut on a soft spot, then rains 

 upon it a shower of blows with his bill, afterwards 

 actually taking up in his bill little lumps of earth 



