92 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



stirring every month in the year, as any one may see 

 that will only be at the trouble of taking a candle to a 

 grass-plot on any mild winter's night. Red-breasts and 

 wrens in the winter haunt out-houses, stables, and barns, 

 where they find spiders and flies that have laid themselves 

 up during the cold season. But the grand support of the 

 soft-billed birds in winter is that infinite profusion of 

 aureliae of the lepidoptera ordo, which is fastened to the 

 twigs of trees and their trunks ; to the pales and walls of 

 gardens and buildings ; and is found in every cranny and 

 cleft of rock or rubbish, and even in the ground itself. 



Every species of titmouse winters with us ; they have 

 what I call a kind of intermediate bill between the hard 

 and the soft, between the Linnaean genera of fringilla and 

 molacilla. One species alone spends its whole time in 

 the woods and fields, never retreating for succour in the 

 severest seasons to houses and neighbourhoods ; and that 

 is the delicate long-tailed titmouse, which is almost as 

 minute as the golden-crowned wren : but the blue tit- 

 mouse, or nun (parus caeruleus}, the cole-mouse (parus 

 ater\ the great black-headed titmouse (fringillago\ and the 

 marsh titmouse (parus palustris}, all resort, at times, to 

 buildings; and in hard weather particularly. The great 

 titmouse, driven by stress of weather, much frequents 

 houses, and, in deep snows, I have seen this bird, while it 

 hung with its back downwards (to my no small delight and 

 admiration), draw straws lengthwise from out the eaves of 

 thatched houses, in order to pull out the flies that were 

 concealed between them, and that in such numbers that 

 they quite defaced the thatch, and gave it a ragged 

 appearance. 



The blue titmouse, or nun, is a great frequenter of 

 houses, and a general devourer. Beside insects, it is very 

 fond of flesh ; for it frequently picks bones on dunghills : 

 it is a vast admirer of suet, and haunts butchers' shops. 

 When a boy, I have known twenty in a morning caught 

 with snap mousetraps, baited with tallow or suet. It will 

 also pick holes in apples left on the ground, and be well 

 entertained with the seeds on the head of a sun-flower, 



