1 8 IN BIRD LAND. 



this, he reached a point where the limb made an 

 obtuse angle by bending obliquely downward. Now 

 what would he do? Would he really hitch down 

 that branch head-foremost, only for once ? By no 

 means. Catch him committing such a breach of 

 creeper decorum ! He suddenly spread his wings 

 and hurled himself to the lower end of that oblique 

 section of the branch, and then ambled up to the 

 angle in regular orthodox fashion. You will never 

 find him doing anything to give employment to the 

 heresy hunters ! i 



Have any of my fellow-observers ever seen this 

 merry-andrew convert himself into a whirligig? I 

 once witnessed this droll performance, which seemed 

 almost like a vagary. A creeper was clinging to a 

 large oak-tree near the base, when he took it into 

 his crazy little pate, for what earthly — or unearthly — 

 reason I know not, to wheel around like a top several 



1 Some months after the foregoing had appeared in the 

 columns of a popular journal I had occasion to modify one 

 assertion. For many years I had been studying the creeper, 

 and had never seen him descend a tree or bough head-first 

 until one autumn day while loitering in the woods. A creeper 

 was hitching up the stem of a sapling in his characteristic 

 manner ; as I drew near, he seemed to catch a glimpse of a 

 tidbit in his rear, near the sapling's root. In his extreme 

 haste to secure it before I drove him away, he wheeled 

 around, scuttled down over the bark head-foremost a distance 

 of perhaps two feet, picked up his morsel, and then dashed 

 out of sight, as if ashamed of his breach of creeper etiquette, 

 probably to eat humble pie at his leisure. That was in the 

 autumn of 1892. Since then no creeper, to my knowledge, 

 has been guilty of a similar offence against the convenances. 



