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234 wings. When the tips of these strike amongst the bunches of needles, a sharp, thin, vibratory rattle is produced—also a very noticeable sound.

"The nut-hatch—or another one—now flies in again, uttering, as he arrives, a curious, high, sharp note—'zitch, zitch, zitch'—and again flies away with a thin brown flake in his bill, a very woody morsel it would seem. And now, later in the afternoon, I see a great-tit probing the cones with his bill, and he also pulls out a brown flake and flies away with it. Another does the same, hanging from the tip of a cone, on which he afterwards perches for a moment, before flying with it to another tree. Whilst standing, all this time, in the tree, I had noticed little hard brown seeds about the size of apple-pips, and which had all been cracked, lying in the forks formed by the junction of the branches with the trunk. There was hardly one such resting-place in which there were not a few of these cracked seeds. Pulling off a fir-cone, I began to pull it to pieces, and at once saw, at the base of every club where it had joined and helped to form the central pillar, the double indentation, one on either side of the median line—or mid-rib as it would be called in a true leaf—in which the two seeds had been lying. Soon I came upon a seed itself, and, attached to the outer end of it—that farthest from the base of the club—I at once recognised the little brown flaky leaf that I had seen in the bills of all three birds, but which none of them seemed to eat.

"Here, then, the whole mystery—for to my ignorance it had been such—was explained. The birds were picking out the seeds from the cone, and the way to do this was to seize the thin brown flake to which the