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Updated: June 11, 2025
The woodpeckers amble up the boles and branches of trees, and when they wish to descend, as they do occasionally for a short distance, they hitch down backward. The brown creepers ascend their vertical or oblique walls in the same way, but seldom, if ever, do anything else than clamber upward, never descending head downward after the fashion of the nuthatches.
I should think that every boy living in the country would find keen pleasure in making and erecting nest-boxes for martins, wrens, and squirrels; in putting up straw teepees in winter for the quail, in feeding the quail, and in nailing to the trees chunks of suet and fat pork every winter for the woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other winter residents.
These, with the noisy crested jays, an occasional "camp-robber," the little nuthatches, the cheerful canyon wren with his rollicking song, the happy water-ousel, "kill-deer," and road-runners and the water birds, ducks, geese, and mud-hens, with an occasional crane, made up the bird life seen in the open country and in these upper canyons.
At your approach, instead of flitting off a little way, perhaps to the next tree or bush, after the manner of the tits and nuthatches and many other birds, the finches tarry in the tree-tops as long as they deem it safe, then take to wing and fly to a distant part of the woods, and you may not see them again that day.
After the woodpeckers have abandoned their nests, or rather chambers, which they do after the first season, their cousins, the nuthatches, chickadees, and brown creepers, fall heir to them. These birds, especially the creepers and nuthatches, have many of the habits of the Picidæ, but lack their powers of bill, and so are unable to excavate a nest for themselves.
The bill and feet are bright coral red. Black bulbuls utter a variety of notes, most of which are pleasing to the human ear, although they incline to harshness. The birds go about in flocks. Nuthatches are little climbing birds characterised by short tails. Like woodpeckers, they feed on insects, which they pick off the trunks and branches of trees.
In a tall sycamore tree standing alone at the fringe of a piece of woodland, sparrow hawks, red-breasted woodpeckers, and nuthatches, a pair of each, had set up their household gods. The tree was still bare of foliage, for it had few branches, and the season was early spring.
This streamlet flowed out of the mouth of the cave, and came from a lake on the top of the mountain; this accounted for its warmth to the hand, which surprised us all. Birds of any kind were rare in these woods. A pigeon-hawk came prowling by our camp, and the faint piping call of the nuthatches, leading their young through the high trees, was often heard.
I gazed long and long up into the dark, dense green mass of the tree to make out the cause of all this excitement. The chickadees were clinging to the ends of the sprays, as usual, apparently very busy looking for food, and all the time uttering their shrill plaint. The nuthatches perched about upon the branches or ran up and down the tree trunks, incessantly piping their displeasure.
It occurred to me that a little cocoa-nut with a hole at one end would be the sort of sleeping-chamber she would prefer, as being most like a hole in a tree-stem, in which, probably, nuthatches roost. An empty cocoa-nut was, therefore, provided.
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