54 AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. 



His call, though much like the yank of the white-breast, is pitched to 

 a higher key and has even a more pronounced nasal intonation, sound- 

 ing as if he had caught a bad cold. Besides he gives expression to 

 some cheery notes that seemed to be reserved for his own family or 

 exclusive social circles. I found these pretty nuthatches in the pine 

 woods on Mackinac Island in mid-summer, and have good reason to 

 believe that they breed there. 



Cavities in trees or stumps furnish the red-breasts with nesting places 

 suited to their taste; but, difiEering from the preceding species, they 

 have a cunning way of plastering the entrance above and below with 

 pine pitch, so as to make it just large enough to admit their tiny 

 bodies and yet too small to admit their enemies. In this respect they 

 steal the laurels from their white-breasted kinsmen, who seem to have 

 no means by which to lessen the dimensions of their natural doorways. 



A still smaller member of this group is the brown-headed nuthatch 

 ( Sitta pusilla) , a resident of the South Atlantic and Gulf States, wan- 

 dering "accidentally" as far north at rare intervals as New York and 

 Missouri. A daintily dressed little fellow is this bird, the top and back 

 of his head being a dark grayish brown, with a whitish patch on the 

 nape, while the rest of his upper parts are bluish-gray and his under 

 parts grayish-white. His favorite dwelling places are in the pine 

 woods of the south, where he is on the most cordial terms socially 

 with the pine warbler and the red-cockaded woodpecker. A most 

 active little body, he scampers about from the roots of the trees to the 

 terminal twigs at the top, inspecting every cone, cranny and knot-hole, 

 chirping his fine, high-keyed notes, sometimes in a querulous tone, 

 and again in the most cheerful and good natured temper imaginable, 

 now gliding up a tree-trunk, now scudding down head foremost, and 

 anon circling in a spiral course. 



One autumn I found a number of these nuthatches associated with a 

 flock of myrtle warblers on the most sociable terms in a pine wood- 

 land not far from Pensacola, Florida. Now they were up in the trees, 

 now down on the ground. . All the while they were chirping in their 

 most genial tones. In a spring jaunt to southern Mississippi I was 

 fortunate enough to find a nest in a half-decayed snag. It contained 

 four of the prettiest half-fledged bird babies that have ever greeted 

 my sight. 



Oddly enough, our tiny clamberers utter a loud, shrill alarm call 

 that bears close resemblance to the querulous protest of the sparrow 

 hawk as you approach her nest or young. Mr. Frank M. Chapman 

 says of the brown heads. "They are talkative sprites, and, like a 

 group of school children, each one chatters away without paying the 

 slightest attention to what his companions are saying." 



