154 Among the Birds in Northern Shires. 



retiring ways and love for the timber all assisting in 

 its concealment. The Wryneck is something of an 

 anomaly. Internally it resembles the Woodpeckers 

 (the Wrynecks form a sub-family of the Picidae); its 

 plumage is mottled and dusted and pencilled like 

 that of a Nightjar; its tail-feathers are soft and 

 flexible; it rarely, if ever, climbs the timber, and 

 hops about the slender branches like the typical 

 Passeres. These external characteristics are, how- 

 ever, quite in harmony with its ways of life. 



Among the more familiar Passerine birds of the 

 woodlands we may first allude to the Titmice. They 

 are the special small birds of the trees, and every 

 British species if we exclude the abnormal Bearded 

 Titmouse is found amongst them. Not only so, 

 but the northern woods in certain parts of Scotland 

 are the exclusive home of the Crested Tit a bird 

 that we saw on one occasion near Sheffield. Few- 

 woods in our experience more abounded with Tit- 

 mice than the birch and alder coppices along the 

 Rivelin Valley, especially in autumn, and invariably 

 mingled with them at that season were flights of 

 migrant Goldcrests. Allied to the Titmice we also 

 have the soberly arrayed little Creeper, and the 

 more showy plumaged Nuthatch. The latter, how- 

 ever, is exceedingly local in our Yorkshire woods, 

 and we are not aware that it breeds to the north of 

 the county, or that it is found at all in Ireland. The 



