176 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



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 

 aurelice 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 Linncean genera of Fringilla and 

 Motadlla. 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, 1 which is almost as 

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

 mouse or nun (parus cceruleus), 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. Besides 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 



1 jEgithalus vagans (Leach). [R. B. S.] 



