144 



WINTER WREN. 



logs, small bushes, and rushes near watery places ; he even 

 approaches the farmhouse, rambles about the wood pile, 

 creeping among the interstices like a mouse. With tail erect, 

 which is his constant habit, mounted on some projecting point 

 or pinnacle, he sings with great animation. Even in the yards, 

 gardens, and outhouses of the city, he appears familiar and 

 quite at home. In short, he possesses almost all the habits of 

 the European species. He is, however, migratory, which may 

 be owing to the superior coldness of our continent. Never 

 having met with the nest and eggs, I am unable to say how 

 nearly they approximate to those of the former. 



I can find no precise description of this bird, as an American 

 species, in any European publication. Even some of our own 

 naturalists seem to have confounded it with another very 

 different bird, the marsh wren,* which arrives in Pennsylvania 

 from the south in May, builds a globular or pitcher-shaped 

 nest, which it suspends among the rushes and bushes by the 

 river-side, lays five or six eggs of a dark fawn colour, and 

 departs again in September. But the colours and markings of 

 that bird are very unlike those of the winter wren, and its 

 song altogether different. The circumstance of the one arriv- 

 ing from the north as the other returns to the south, and vice 

 versa, with some general resemblance between the two, may 

 have occasioned this mistake. They, however, not only breed 

 in different regions, but belong to different genera, the marsh 

 wren being decisively a species of Certhia, and the winter wren 

 a true Motacilla. Indeed we have no less than five species of 

 these birds in Pennsylvania, that, by a superficial observer, 

 would be taken for one and the same ; but between each of 

 which nature has drawn strong, discriminating, and indelible 

 lines of separation. These will be pointed out in their proper 

 places. 



If this bird, as some suppose, retires only to the upper 

 regions of the country and mountainous forests to breed, as 



* See Professor Barton's observations on this subject, under the 

 article Motacilla troglodytes? Fragments, &c, p. 18 ; ibid. p. 12. 



