FEBRUARY 45 



berries that attract him ; you might as well set a football 

 before a hungry schoolboy and bid him break his fast 

 upon it. No : like a typical Englishman, this tiny fowl 

 ejaculates ' A fine morning ! What shall we kill to-day ? ' 

 He lives by slaughter; wherefore his favourite haunt is 

 the pine wood, for there, among the warm green needle- 

 clusters, he is most sure to find the diminutive flying 

 insects, larvse, and eggs upon which he feeds. That is 

 the secret of his preference for evergreens, and he con- 

 descends to visit my holly-tree because of the harbour 

 it affords to insect life. 



The activity of our Regulus is bewildering. The holly- 

 tree is over thirty feet high, and bulky withal, yet within 

 half an hour this indefatigable atom has run over every 

 branch of it to its tip, half on foot and half on wing, 

 swinging round, heels uppermost, to examine the under 

 surfaces of the leaves, and occasionally darting out after 

 small fluttering moths dislodged from shelter. I was 

 fairly baffled in attempting to compute the distance 

 travelled by the bird in beating the single tree before 

 he went on to the next. Montagu, the ornithologist, 

 however, has left on record an observation which affords 

 some basis for calculations. He was lucky enough to 

 transfer to his own study a nest with eight young gold- 

 crests, without detaching them from the care of their 

 parents. He noted carefully how often the little 

 mother visited the brood, and found that she did so 

 on an average of once in every minute and a half 

 or two minutes, practically thirty-six visits in every 

 hour during a summer day of sixteen hours, or 546 

 visits a day. Now, let us suppose that each of these 

 journeys extended to no more than a hundred yards a 



