THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION 



hatches that fed at the same table looked coarse 

 and common beside this little delicate waif from the 

 far North. He could not stand to see lying about 

 a superabundance of cracked hickory-nuts, any 

 more than his larger relatives could, and would 

 work industriously, carrying them away and hiding 

 them in the woodpile and summer-house near by. 

 The other nuthatches bossed him, as they in turn 

 were bossed by Downy, and as he in turn bossed 

 the brown creeper and the chickadees. In early 

 April my little red-breast disappeared, and I fan- 

 cied him turning his face northward, urged by a 

 stronger impulse than that for food and shelter 

 merely. He was my tiny guest from unknown lands, 

 my baby bird, and he left a vacancy that none of 

 the others could fill. 



The nuthatches are much more pleasing than the 

 woodpeckers. Soft- voiced, soft-colored, gentle-man- 

 nered, they glide over the rough branches and the 

 tree-trunks with their boat-shaped bodies, going up 

 and down and around, with apparently an extra 

 joint in their necks that enables them, head-down- 

 ward, to look straight out from the tree-trunk; their 

 motions seem far less mechanical and angular than 

 those of the woodpeckers and the creepers. Downy 

 can back down a tree by short hitches, but he never 

 ventures to do it headfirst, nor does the creeper; 

 but the universal joint in the nuthatch's body and 

 its rounded keel enable it to move head on indif- 



23 



