128 WILD BIRDS 



man a day, sometimes not a man a week, passes. It 

 seems not to matter to the wren where he lives or 

 nests. He nests in ivied walls, and, if we watched 

 wrens only about old houses, we should think that 

 this was his regular nesting spot. But wrens that live 

 among banks and ditches nest in banks and ditches ; 

 and wrens that live about thatched cottages and 

 cowsheds nest in the roofs or under the roofs or in 

 stacks of faggots piled up for firing. If the wren 

 chances to live in fields and field corners where there 

 are hayricks, he makes, or finds already made, a little 

 hollow in the side of the rick, and he nests there. 

 One can safely write he, for quite as often as not 

 at the beginning of spring more often than not it 

 is the cock wren, not the hen, that is nest-making. 

 The wren is a bird of dry places, where are no 

 springs at the surface, and where well-borers have 

 to pierce hundreds of feet deep to find water. 

 The wren can find plenty of food in the driest 

 of places. Yet whenever I go among streams I 

 find the wren at once, and so at home that he seems 

 to me a water bird. Among the Perthshire streams 

 I found the wren common at the end of summer. 

 At the same season I find the wren at home deep 

 down among the streams that purl and simmer 

 through the little ravines of North Yorkshire ; 

 yet he was on the heights above, even at the edge 

 of the moors. At the edge of the sea I often find 

 him. As for heaths and commons, where there is 

 plenty of scrub and bracken tangle, the wren can 

 scarcely be absent. There is a particular and 



