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Updated: June 11, 2025
With altered life-habits the numerous divergent forms originated; some, like Xiphorynchus, retaining a probing beak in a wonderfully modified form, attenuated in an extreme degree, and bent like a sickle; others diverging more in the direction of nuthatches and woodpeckers.
Here are the Creepers of Europe; the Nuthatches of North America and Europe; varieties of the Wren; and the Warblers of Guiana and Patagonia. The visitor next approaches the varieties of the family known as the tooth-beaked perching birds. To this family our choicest songsters belong.
Sometimes, too, he thrusts his long, slender beak into a crevice and pries with it in a way that threatens to snap it off in the middle. The woodpeckers and creepers use their spiny tails as supports while stationary or in motion; not so the nuthatches, which are sufficiently nimble on their feet to stand or glide without converting their tails into braces.
The Nuthatches and other cousins of the Chickadees took this warning seriously, and set about learning how and when to go; but Tomtit, who led his brothers, only laughed and turned a dozen wheels around a twig that served him for a trapeze. "Go to the south?" said he. "Not I; I am too well contented here; and as for frost and snow, I never saw any and have no faith in them."
Pine-wood sparrows, pine warblers, and red-winged blackbirds were in song; two red-shouldered hawks were screaming, a flicker was shouting, a red-bellied woodpecker cried kur-r-r-r, brown-headed nuthatches were gossiping in the distance, and suddenly I heard, what I never thought to hear in a pinery, the croak of a green heron. I turned quickly and saw him. It was indeed he.
It weighs only two pounds, eight ounces, and its cost is so trifling that any guerrilla who wishes one can easily find the money for its purchase. There are in the United States at least a million men and boys quite mean enough to use this weapon on song-birds, swallows, woodpeckers, nuthatches, rabbits and squirrels, and like other criminals, hide both weapon and loot in their clothing.
Besides these were little red-polls, dressed warmly in magenta and brown for the winter, hopping and clinging among the seed-weeds exposed by the breezes; and hardy, impudent, harsh-voiced blue-jays, cloaking much villany and cunning under wondrous suits of clothes; and trim, neat cedar wax-wings, perching on elevated twigs, always apparently at leisure; in the woods, whole bands of chickadees and nuthatches, cruising it cheerfully, calling to each other in their varied notes, tiny atoms defying all the cold and famine Old Winter could bring.
Injurious insects find their doom when the young house and Carolina wrens are on the wing. Catbirds and robins are among the most abundant breeders, while chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches are less often seen. The bluebird haunts the hollow apple trees, and of the thrushes proper the veery or Wilson's and the splendid wood thrush sing to their mates on the nests among the saplings.
It happens, however, that these birds resemble each other only in their climbing feet; in the form of their beaks they are as wide apart as are nuthatches, woodpeckers, crows, and curlews. They also differ markedly in the manner of seeking their food.
Afterwards I found two nests, one in a low stump, and one in the trunk of a pine, fifteen or twenty feet from the ground. In dress the brown-head is dingy, with little or nothing of the neat and attractive appearance of our New England nuthatches. In this pine-wood on the road to Moultrie I found no sign of the new woodpecker or the new sparrow. Nor was I greatly disappointed.
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