146 GOLDCREST. 
in a cage, where one having died of his wounds, the other 
acain mounted upon it, pecked at it, and tried to draw it 
round the cage, and this though itself too died shortly 
afterwards. The female selected a new mate, and built a nest 
over the spot where the fatal battle was fought. Colonei 
Montagu also mentions one which would feed her young in 
a room even when the nest was taken into the hand. He 
found that she fed her brood once im every minute and a 
half or two minutes, averaging thirty-six times in the hour, 
and this for full sixteen hours in a day. ‘The young ones, 
eight in number, would thus receive, if equally fed, seventy- 
two feeds each day, the whole amounting to five hundred and 
seventy-six. The male would not venture into the room. 
They appear to bear confinement pretty well. In severe 
seasons many perish, and several are frequently at such times 
found dead in outhouses, the thatch of roofs, and holes in 
ivy-covered walls, where they had assembled together for 
mutual warmth under thei shelter from the extremity of the 
wintry blast, and have been known to take up their abode 
in the nest of the Wren. In those times of scarcity they 
will even approach houses in search of food, and will enter 
greenhouses and hothouses. ven in mild seasons some are 
found in a lifeless state, but only single birds. They usually 
go in companies of twenty or thirty. It is said that they 
may be shaken down from a branch by striking a blow against 
the trunk of the tree. . 
In their longer passages from wood to wood, their flight, 
which is weak, is rather rapid, irregular, and undulating, but 
in their shorter flittings more straight. They sometimes 
exhibit an odd bowing movement of the body, especially in the 
spring when two are about to fight. They often run up trees 
with the nimbleness and agility of the Creeper. 
Their food consists principally of small winged and other 
Insects and their larve, and also of smail seeds. In pursuit 
of the former they carefully search branch after branch, their 
elegant crests, so to call them, shewing to advantage every 
now and then; they also seize their prey on the wing, and 
hover sometimes over the branches before darting on it, and 
also creep nimbly in a mouse-lhke manner, up the trunks of 
trees, seldom in a straight line, but usually in a sloping 
direction, the capture of an insect being often denoted by a 
shuffle of the wings: one has also been observed creeping up 
a wall in like manner, searching for insects. “The activity 
