38 THE Birps Asout Us. 
had them within arm’s length, and when so near, to 
look at me with a curious twist of the head and ex- 
pression of satisfaction, as much as to say, “I’m glad 
I’m not such a looking thing as that ;” and well they 
may be. 
Thoreau, under date of October 4, records,— 
“The birds seem to delight in these first fine days of the fall, in 
the warm, hazy light,—robins, bluebirds (in families on the almost 
bare elms), phoebes, and probably purple finches. I hear half-strains 
of many of them, as the song-sparrow, bluebird, etc., and the sweet 
phe-bee of the chickadee. Now the year itself begins to be ripe, 
ripened by the frost like a persimmon.” 
Again, he says,— 
“As I stood looking, I heard a smart fche-day-day-day close to 
my ear, and, looking up, saw four or five chickadees which had come 
to scrape acquaintance with me, hopping amid the alders within three 
or four feet of me. I had heard them farther off at first, and they 
had followed me along the hedge. They day-day’d and lisped their 
faint notes alternately, and then, as if to make me think they had 
some other errand than to peer at me, they pecked the dead twigs, 
the little top-heavy, black-crowned, volatile fellows.” 
The above tells the whole story of a chickadee’s 
winter life, and no professional naturalist ever told it 
half so well. 
It is to be regretted that the Crested Titmouse is not 
a New England bird. Emerson and Thoreau would 
have made good use of it. Strangely enough, Wilson 
says but little about it, and Nuttall goes extensively 
into the matter of its song, but nothing else. In 
New Jersey this bird is a resident, and whatever the 
weather, is not to be found skulking. I have seen 
one clinging to the very top of a tall shell-bark in the 
