Rambles With John Burroughs Part 8

I see two or three of them near my office every day, and take much delight in my study of them and their habits. They have a peculiar way of perching, head downward, on the trunk of a tree and go that way most of the time. A small white-breasted bird on the trunk of a tree with head downward, is pretty good evidence that it is the nuthatch. This att.i.tude is so natural that the older ornithologists--Audubon and Wilson--claim that they sleep in that position. I am not prepared to affirm or deny the rumor as my study of this bird, and all other birds, is restricted to their daylight comedies and tragedies, though I do often hear certain members of bird families singing at all hours of the night during certain seasons.

His song is, as above stated, quite simple only one note repeated over and over--konk-konk, konk-konk, two strokes generally in rapid succession--a kind of a nasal piping, or as one bird lover has said: "A peculiar, weird sound, somewhat like the quack of a duck, but higher keyed and with less volume, having a rather musical tw.a.n.g."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MY CHICKADEE'S NEST]

During the winter months he finds much time to search about on the ground for food, and consequently his crop is at such time partly filled with noxious weed seeds. In spring and summer, he searches all round the trunks and branches of trees for small insects and insect eggs, and as you approach him to study him he seems entirely unconscious of your presence, which I have thought almost approaches human affectation, and I wonder if this is not one of the alluring arts of the white-breasted nuthatch. Birds, in some way or other, express almost all human attributes, love, hate, anger, joy, sorrow, if we only are able to read them, and it is not unreasonable to a.s.sume that they are sometimes affectatious. The Southern mocking bird certainly seems to border vanity sometimes.