Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/141

Rh robin-like, to seize a worm. Goldfinches sing amongst the falling apple-blossom, which begins to cover the grass under the trees with a carpet rose-tinted and white. The shy hawfinch, too, is extremely partial to these orchards. At first it appears as if every hole held its brood of hungry, clamorous starlings. The old birds are constantly arriving with food, chattering and squalling. The green-woodpecker has no sooner hewn out his burrow in the old pear-tree than he is promptly evicted by these pushing and unscrupulous neighbours. The wiser nuthatches have plastered up the entrance to their tenement with clay, which sets as hard as brick, leaving a way of ingress just sufficient for themselves, but impossible for any bird of larger bulk. But there are holes which are not roomy enough for the starling. These are prime favourites with the redstart, the tree-sparrow and the various tits. Here, too, the Wryneck, with its delicately pencilled plumage of brown and grey and black which harmonizes so well with the colour of the bark, skulks out of sight behind the branch up which it is climbing,—a mysterious bird, so little seen that only its loud monotonous cry of "pay, pay, pay," tells how numerous it really is in the orchard country. By lucky chance one may surprise it at an ant-hill, where its long sticky tongue takes up the startled emmets in crowds. If taken unawares in its nesthole, it hisses and squirms in such a way that its