WILD LIFE: FURRED AND FEATHERED. 47 



Its song consists only of a few reiterated notes, but soon it 

 will take on quite a gay tone and make itself heard in 

 every little grove. 



Few birds are so beautifully marked, or rather we 

 should say so delicately pencilled, as is the wryneck, the 

 cuckoo's mate or herald, which comes to us always a few 

 days in advance of the latter. "The merry pee bird" 

 the song calls him. Pee-pee-pee he cries from the end of 

 March right on till Midsummer. This is a bird that 

 eludes observation ; its short undulating flight makes it 

 also difficult to observe. The name wryneck has been 

 given to it owing to the peculiar way it has of twisting its 

 neck round as it sits; it will hiss loudly too when 

 disturbed on its nest, so that it is often called the snake 

 bird. Country children hail its pee-pee-pee or pay-pay- 

 pay, for the cuckoo is coming, they say, as they hear it ; 

 and somehow all children of smaller or larger growth are 

 glad to note the first shoutings of the cuckoo. The 

 wryneck's nest, with its pure white thin-shelled eggs, will 

 be found generally in some hole in a tree-trunk, not far 

 from the ground, and sometimes in a sandbank; but that 

 will not be for nearly two months yet. 



Now is the time to go and sit in some quiet nook 

 of one of our Surrey woods, to listen for the yikeing laugh 

 of the green woodpecker. Rain-bird he is called in some 

 districts, because his loud pleu-pleu-pleu is supposed to 

 tell that we may expect wet weather. Yaffle, too, is a 

 name given to him, and a most startling effect his 

 laughing-like notes have, falling, as they often do, on the 

 still evening air. The yaffle makes a new hole for his nest 

 each season, but he uses the old holes as a sleeping-place. 

 The greater and lesser spotted woodpeckers too, you may 



