head and cardinal at his throat. The 
female has a white throat and cardinal 
or black cap. I have noticed one with 
a cardinal cap that had little black 
feathers sticking here and there like an 
emery bag. They are very full of fun, 
even riotous in play, and shout, in their 
summer home — the woods of the north 
— but they are very quiet when winter- 
ing with us, and often flit away without 
a sound. 
Of the nuthatches, the pretty .white- 
breasted one with his soft bluish-grey 
coat and shining black head, is our fa- 
miliar resident and the red-breasted an 
occasional winter companion. They 
are charming little birds, not spe- 
cially musical, though their call is 
vigorous and friendly, but very pretty 
and gentle, and awakening perpetual 
wonder and admiration at their feats as 
acrobats, running as lightly head down- 
wards as in a natural position, and show- 
ing equal swiftness and grace in every 
movement, whether with aid of wings 
or without. They never seem in the 
least afraid of us, but raise their softly 
rounded heads and look at us with a 
most delightful confidence. 
The brown creeper is like a bit of the 
trunk in his brown tints, mottled as if 
in mimicry of the play of light and 
shadow on the bark. He is as truly a 
tree-creature as ever Greek fable de- 
vised, and can so flatten himself, 
when alarmed, against a tree that no 
inch of his light breast is visible, and it 
is difficult, indeed, to recognize him as 
a separate being. He is the one 
species found in America of quite 
a large Old World family, and has some 
odd characteristics. First, his long tail, 
used to aid him in climbing, is rather 
curved and stiff and generally worn by 
constant use. His bill is also curved, 
so that the profile of his figure is like a 
relaxed bow as he works his plodding 
way up the side of the tree, diligently 
seeking insects, eggs, and larvae, in the 
minute crevices of the bark. He sticks 
his little nest, made, of course, of bits 
of dead wood, bark, and twigs, between 
the tree and a strip of loose bark, very 
like a part of the tree itself, and the 
eggs are spotted and dotted with wood 
colors, brown in different shades, and 
lavender. Altogether his life is a tree- 
study; the tree is to him home, model, 
hunting-ground, hiding-place, and ref- 
uge. He never descends by creeping, 
but when he wants to search a lower 
part of the trunk, he flies to the base, 
and begins it all over again. In the 
summer fir-wood, farther northward, it 
is said he sings, but in winter-time we 
hear only a faint squeak, a little like 
one bough scraping against another. 
The black-and-white creeping warb- 
ler is very like our sober brown creeper 
in habit, but he, like most of his gay 
brethren, is only a summer guest. In 
his place we have Carolina chickadees 
and golden-crowned kinglets-and even, 
by good luck, an occasional ruby- 
crowned. All these tiny creatures have 
the most charming and airy ways of 
flitting from bough to bough, swinging 
lightly from the utmost end of a 
bough, daintily dropping to unex- 
pected resting-places, and rarely paus- 
ing for a second's breathing-time any- 
where. The Carolina chickadee is said 
to have a longer note and more varied 
repertoire than his northern cousin, yet 
whenever I have heard him in winter 
weather, there is the same silvery and 
joyous tinkle of showering Chick-a-dee- 
dee-dees from the pretty gray and black- 
capped flock that I have heard in Mas- 
sachusetts. Perhaps the variations are 
more evident in his summer singing. 
I have left the kinglet for the last, but 
it is hard to do justice to this lovely 
little bird that, if the food-supply be all 
right, will often elect to stay with us in 
winter rather than migrate to Mexico. 
His colors are exquisite, olive-green 
bordered by darker tints that throw the 
green above and the yellow-tinted white 
below into fine relief; a brilliant crown 
of reddish-gold, bordered by black and 
yellow, and every feather preened to 
satiny smoothness. He gleans his food 
merrily, singing or calling softly to 
himself as he works. His nest is built 
in the far northern forests, sometimes 
swinging as high as sixty feet, and 
woven of pale green mosses, lined with 
strips of the silky inside back and 
down for the many nestlings. 
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