Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/228

210 suet in the trees, and pretty often to a piece that is nailed upon one of my window-sills. I hear the fellow's pleasant, contented, guttural, grunting notes, and rise to look at him, liking especially to watch the tidbits as they travel one after another between his long mandibles. Even if he does not call out, I know that it is he, and not a chickadee, by the louder noise he makes in driving his bill into the fat.

I have fancied, all winter, that the birds—these two nuthatches, I mean—were mated, seeing them so often together; and perhaps they are; but the other day I witnessed a little performance that seemed to put another complexion upon the case. I was leaving the yard when I heard bird notes, repeated again and again, which I did not recognize. To the best of my recollection they were quite new. I looked up into a tree, and there were the two nuthatches, one chasing the other from branch to branch, with that peculiarly dainty, fluttering, mincing action of the wings, a sort of will-you-be-mine motion, which birds are given to using in the excitement of courtship. There could