3 6 4 



Wild Life in Wales 



difficult to believe it to be possible of accomplishment by a 

 bird, whose only tool is its bill, and I have often marvelled 

 at the perseverance which such labour indicates. More 

 usually the holes are bored in softer wood, or through the 

 skin of a tree whose interior is already more or less 

 decayed. 



Near the ruins of Tan-y-Castell, under Castell Carn 

 Dochan, the old home of a celebrated bard, Robert Thomas 

 Ap-Vychan, there was a Green Woodpecker's nest in the 

 bole of a wild cherry tree, quite twenty feet from the 

 ground, which was tenanted for two years in succession, 

 to my knowledge, and it did not look like a particularly 

 new hole when I first saw it. I repeatedly noticed the old 

 bird approach this hole from a few feet above ; the manner 

 of descent being by a series of downward hops, tail first, in 

 a slightly spiral direction. I particularly refer to this, as 

 Selby's assertion, that the bird progressed in this way was 

 rather doubted by the late Professor Newton. 1 In view of 

 the support which such birds receive from the stiff tail 

 feathers, it is probable that they could not, if they would, 

 descend a tree in any other fashion. I have more than 

 once seen a Great Spotted Woodpecker make a few similar 

 downward hops, and it is quite a common method of pro- 

 gression with the Tree Creeper. The Nuthatch, on the 

 other hand, receiving no support from its short square tail, 

 hops, head foremost, down a tree with as much ease as it 

 ascends, and, indeed, seems almost to prefer that position 

 to an upright one. In the wood above Craig-y-tan, I one 

 day saw a Green Woodpecker descend a rock backwards, 

 some three feet or more, to recover something which had 

 been detached from above and had fallen to the ground. It 

 afterwards reascended the rock before flying off. 



The Wild Cherry is quite a feature in many parts of the 

 Dee valley, the trees, when smothered under their sheets of 

 white blossom, in early May, lighting up the margins of 

 the woods in a way that makes one wonder that they are 

 not more extensively used in planting for effect. Repeatedly, 

 I have heard passengers in the train exclaiming at the beauty 



1 See Yarrell, 4th ed., vol. ii. p. 458. 



