60 OUR RARER BRITISH BREEDING BIRDS. 



in some crevice. I know a Surrey orchard wherein 

 every available crack and cranny is filled in the 

 autumn with the empty shells of Kentish cob-nuts, 

 from which Nuthatches have extracted the kernels. 

 The bird's note is easy to detect, especially the 

 fine long whistle of the male uttered during the 

 springtime. It is quite unlike the note of any 

 other British bird, and at once arrests the atten- 

 tion of the naturalist. 



The nest is made in a hole in the trunk or 

 large branch of a tree, and occasionally in a wall 

 or the side of a rick. Its most striking peculiarity 

 is that if the hole chosen should be too large, the 

 bird plasters it up with earth until it will only 

 just admit her own body. I have never seen a hole 

 without any plastering, but have examined one with 

 so little that, in spite of being close to a footpath, 

 its presence would in all probability never have 

 been suspected but for the actions of the parent 

 birds. 



Our illustration was secured in one of the 

 beautiful lime and chestnut avenues in the town 

 of Torquay, where my friend Mr. Charles Snell 

 says two pairs of Nuthatches live, at different points, 

 all the year round, and are fed during the winter 

 months by some considerate bird-lovers with Bar- 

 celona nuts. He informs me that he has often 

 sat on a garden seat close by the tree, and watched 

 the old birds run down the bark and into the 

 hole to feed their young ones. By the aid of a 

 ladder we made a somewhat minute examination 

 of the plaster in the upper of the two holes in 

 the chestnut tree, and found that it measured three 

 and a quarter by three and a half inches, and was 

 something like two inches in thickness. It was 

 composed of the red earth of the country, small 



