428 NOTES ON THE 
severe the weather, it may be seen peering about the freshly 
fallen pines in the vicinity of the lumber camps and in the 
evergreen thickets of the same regions. Noisy, restless, 
cheery, he is soon a favorite of the woodsman. 
The earliest nests I have met were built about the last week 
in April and were in holes in trees like those of the nuthatches 
and woodpeckers. It is somewhat enlarged as it extends 
down into the decayed tree or stump for eight or ten inches 
and is lined with soft flexible mosses and animal hairs of dif- 
ferent kinds. Sometimes it appropriates a few birds’ feathers 
and always weaves them nicely into a smooth warm receptacle 
for from six to ten nearly pure white eggs with a slightly red- 
dish tint, and spotted thickly at the larger end with reddish 
brown. These are nearly spherical and measure about .62x.52. 
They generally have two broods in the season. 
The most noteworthy habit I have recognized in this species 
which has so many times been omitted in descriptions of it is 
its almost invariable association with the nuthatches, which if 
not exactly with it are not far away. Next to this their pro- 
clivity to approach so near to one when seated in the deep 
woods. Its notes are too familiar to need description, formu- 
lating so remarkably the words cheweek-a-dee-dee-dee, cheweek-a- 
dee-dee-dee in a clear, distinct and really sweet tone. Its flight 
is not unlike the woodpecker from tree to tree in its search for 
food, and like that species is undulating, and gliding when 
higher in the air. 
As I have been often called upon for my opinion of its habits 
of destroying the buds of fruit trees in blossom, I am cheerful 
to say that I believe no buds ever suffer which have not first 
been made worthless by containing a grub which is destined to 
destroy it. An examination of these buds afterward uniformly 
reveals a burrow which his faithful bill has just emptied. This 
to my mind fully substantiates his claim to friendship and pro- 
tection. He makes no mistakes which sacrifice the perfect buds. 
Endowed also in common with birds in general as he is with 
eyes so constructed as to permit their microscopic as well as. 
telescopic use, he is prepared to examine with unerring cer- 
tainty not only the buds but the bark where eggs as well as the 
hatched vermin are hidden. 
‘The eggs of the moth of the destructive leaf-rolling cater- 
pillar—the canker worm, the apple-tree moth, and others of 
these well-known plagues are greedily eaten by it, and this in 
the inclement winter when most of our other birds have aban- 
