The Bay of the Band 
you may be surethat some woodpecker built the house, 
not this short-billed, soft-tailed little tit. He lacks 
both the bill-chisel and the tail-brace. Perhaps the 
explanation of his fondness for birch trees lies here: 
they die young and soon decay. 
The birds were going down through the top, not 
by a hole in the leathery rind of the sides, for the 
bark would have been too tough for their beaks. 
They would drop into the top of the stub, pick up a 
wad of decayed wood, and fly off to the dead limb of 
the pine. Here, with a jerk and a snap of their bills, 
they would scatter the stuff in a shower so thin and 
far around that I could neither hear it fall nor find a 
trace of it upon the dead leaves of the ground. This 
nest would never be betrayed by the workmen’s 
chips. 
Between the pair there averaged three beakfuls of 
excavating every two minutes, one of the birds regu- 
larly shoveling twice to the other’s once. They looked 
so exactly alike that I could not tell which bird was 
pushing the enterprise ; but I have my suspicions. 
There is nothing so superior about his voice or 
appearance that he should thus shirk. He was doing 
part of his duty, apparently, but it was half-hearted 
84 
