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Updated: June 11, 2025
It is no uncommon thing for a flock to contain all of the four species of tit just described, a number of white-eyes, some nuthatches, warblers, tree-creepers, a woodpecker or two, and possibly some sibias and laughing-thrushes. The Crateropodidæ form a most heterogeneous collection of birds, including, as they do, such divers fowls as babblers, whistling-thrushes, bulbuls, and white-eyes.
The only birds that sang during the month unless we include the red-bellied nuthatches, whose frequent quaint twitterings should, perhaps, come under this head were the chickadees and a single robin. The former I have down as uttering their sweet phoebe whistle which I take to be certainly their song, as distinguished from all their multifarious calls on seven of the thirty-one days.
At Norris Geyser Basin there was a perfect chorus of bird music from robins, purple finches, uncos and mountain bluebirds. In the woods there were mountain chickadees and nuthatches of various kinds, together with an occasional woodpecker. In the northern country we had come across a very few blue grouse and ruffed grouse, both as tame as possible.
For there were chickadees in the clump of red cedars by the barn, and juncos and nuthatches, white-throated sparrows and winter wrens, all so frank in their overtures to the Doctor that the boys with one accord closed threateningly around Muggs to keep him from drumming the birds into flight.
True, the other feathered clamberers and carpenters are fully as useful, but depend upon it, the nuthatches do their share in preserving our forests and orchards. The white-breasted nuthatch is our most common species east of the great plains, breeding from the Gulf States to the northern border of the United States and to New Brunswick.
Instinct is intelligent, but it is not the same as acquired individual intelligence; it is untaught. When the nuthatch carries a fragment of a hickory-nut to a tree and wedges it into a crevice in the bark, the bird is not showing an individual act of intelligence: all nuthatches do this; it is a race instinct.
Odd indeed are some of nature's evolutions, I had almost said caprices, for the rock nuthatch is just as much at home and apparently just as happy on its bleak precipices as is our merry whitebreast in his umbrageous home in the oak or maple forest. But what kind of nests do the rock nuthatches construct on their limestone walls?
Odd as it may seem to the uninformed, the nuthatches belong to the order of passeres or perching birds, in spite of their creeping habits.
"Many a May morning," she says, "have I wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower, mourning over a little apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged blackbirds, many- colored warblers and flycatchers, beautifully clothed yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet tanager and golden oriole, and many more beside, enough to break the heart of a small child to think of!
It is a great rendezvous for these charming little pets, and it is also supplied with Barcelona nuts for nuthatches, who fully appreciate them and carry them off to the nearest tree with rugged bark into which they fix the nuts, and then hammer at the shell till they can extract the contents.
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