NUTHATCHES. 8 1 



is found in some nest in tlie village. Once (I think it was at 

 the time when the Eobin was the victim) boys reported that 

 they saw a Cuekoo sitting on a bough hard by, ^D^th an egg 

 m its hill. There is no doubt whatever that the bill can hold 

 the egg, which is hardly as large as a starling's. 



"We have another much smaller bird in the village which can 

 hold lai^e objects between its mandibles — objects almost as large, 

 and sometimes more bulky, than the egg of the Cuckoo. This 

 is the Nuthatch, which will carry away from a window any 

 number of hard dessert nuts, and store them up in all sorts of 

 holes and comers, where they are sometimes found still un- 

 broken. These plump and neat little birds, whose bills and 

 heads and necks seem all of a piece, while their bodies and tails 

 are not of much account, have been for years accustomed to 

 come for their dinners to my neighbours' windows. One day 

 while sitting with my friend, Col. Barrow, F.E.S. (to whom 

 the Oxford Museum is indebted for a most valuable present 

 of Arctic Birds), we set the Nuthatches a task which at first 

 puzzled them. After letting them carry off a number of nuts 

 in the usual way, we put the nuts into a glass tumbler. The 

 birds arrived, they saw the nuts, and tried to get at them, but 

 in vain. Some invisible obstacle was in the way; they must 

 have thought it most uncanny. They poked and prodded, and 

 departed dizpoKToi. Again they came, and a third time, with 

 the like result. At last one of them took his station on a bit 

 of wood erected for perching purposes just over the lintel ; he 

 saw the nuts below him, down he came upon the tumbler's edge, 

 and in a moment his long neck was stretched downwards and 



G 



