THE GREAT TITMOUSE 207 



Tits together with a great number of tiny and beautiful 

 gold-crested Wrens, that I have ever seen, or indeed can 

 ever hope to see again. It was in a pine forest about 

 twenty miles north of Gotha, the property of Hans 

 Freiherr von Berlepsch, Germany's most ardent bird 

 protector. He was with us at the time and he said 

 even he had never seen the like before, nor had his chief 

 gamekeeper, who is himself an ornithologist. It was 

 the more wonderful because we had walked for nearly 

 three hours through the woods that morning and had 

 seen, with this great exception, little wild life beyond an 

 occasional black Squirrel and, through an avenue of 

 pines from afar, a grand Buck feeding in a clearing. It 

 was in the late autumn. 



Nearly three thousand nesting-boxes have been fixed 

 in the trees there, and it was about one of these, a deep 

 one, that a number of Tits had appropriated as a warm 

 and secure sleeping place for the autumn and winter, 

 that the birds three hundred of them at least the game- 

 keeper declared had gathered; now pouncing down on 

 it, a dozen of them at a time, now settling in noisy 

 zi-zi-zi-ing parties on the high branches of pine round 

 this centre. Perhaps, like Rooks that quarrel over a 

 desirable nesting site, they were all eager to secure 

 specially desirable sleeping quarters. Tits and Wrens 

 do, of course, always go about the woods in parties, 

 when family cares are over, but on such a 'scale as this 

 rarely ; and so many dainty Golden-Crested Wrens 

 together might not be seen again in a life-time. All 

 the species of the Tit family, excepting the Bearded and 

 the Long-tailed Tit were there. 



The amount of good these birds do among forest 

 trees is incalculable, not to mention their greatly mis- 



