400 GREAT CAROLINA WREN. 



of an abandoned flat-boat, fastened to the shore, a small distance below 

 the city of New Orleans. When its song was finished, the bird went on 

 creeping from one board to another, thrust itself through an auger-hole, 

 entered through the boat's side at one place, and peeped out at another, 

 catching numerous spiders and other insects all the while. It sometimes 

 ascends to the higher branches of a tree of moderate size, by climbing 

 along a grape-vine, searching diligently amongst the leaves and in the 

 chinks of the bark, alighting sidewise against the trunk, and moving like 

 a true Creeper.. It possesses the power of creeping and of hopping in a 

 nearly equal degree. The latter kind of motion it employs when nearer 

 the ground, and among piles of drifted timber. So fond is this bird of 

 the immediate neighbourhood of water, that it would be next to impossi- 

 ble to walk along the shore of any of the islands of the Mississippi, from 

 the mouth of the Oliio to New Orleans, without observing several on each 

 island. 



Amongst the many species of insects which they destroy, several are 

 of an aquatic nature, and are procured by them whilst creeping about 

 the masses of drifted wood. Their chirr-up and come-to-me come-to-me 

 seldom cease for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, com- 

 mencing with the first glimpse of day, and continuing sometimes after 

 sunset. 



The nest of the Carolina Wren is usually placed in a hole in some 

 low decayed tree, or in a fence-stake, sometimes even in the stable, barn 

 or coach-house, should it there find a place suitable for its reception. I 

 have found some not more than two feet from the ground, in the stump 

 of a tree that had long before been felled by the axe. The materials 

 employed in its construction are hay, grasses, leaves, feathers, and horse- 

 hair, or the dry fibres of the Spanish moss ; the feathers, hair or moss 

 forming the lining, the coarse materials the outer parts. When the hole is 

 sufficiently large, the nest is not unfrequently five or six inches in depth, 

 although only just wide enough to admit one of the birds at a time. 

 The number of eggs is from five to eight. They are of a broad oval 

 form, greyish-white, sprinkled with reddish-brown. Whilst at Oakley, 

 the residence of my friend James Peiirie, Esq. near Bayou Sara, I 

 discovered that one of these birds was in the habit of roosting; in a Wood 

 Thrush's nest that was placed on a low horizontal branch, and had been 

 filled with leaves that had fallen during the autumn. It was in the habit of 



