More interesting than any of the birds yet named, because more strictly characteristic of the place, as well as more strictly new to me, were the brown-headed nuthatches.  I was on the watch for them:  they were one of the three novelties which I knew were to be found in the pine lands, and nowhere else,—­the other two being the red-cockaded woodpecker and the pine-wood sparrow; and being thus on the lookout, I did not expect to be taken by surprise, if such a paradox (it is nothing worse) maybe allowed to pass.  But when I heard them twittering in the distance, as I did almost immediately, I had no suspicion of what they were.  The voice had nothing of that nasal quality, that Yankee twang, as some people would call it, which I had always associated with the nuthatch family.  On the contrary, it was decidedly finchlike,—­so much so that some of the notes, taken by themselves, would have been ascribed without hesitation to the goldfinch or the pine finch, had I heard them in New England; and even as things were, I was more than once deceived for the moment.  As for the birds themselves, they were evidently a cheerful and thrifty race, much more numerous than the red-cockaded woodpeckers, and much less easily overlooked than the pine-wood sparrows.  I seldom entered the flat-woods anywhere without finding them.  They seek their food largely about the leafy ends of the pine branches, resembling the Canadian nuthatches in this respect, so that it is only on rare occasions that one sees them creeping about the trunks or larger limbs.  Unlike their two Northern relatives, they are eminently social, often traveling in small flocks, even in the breeding season, and keeping up an almost incessant chorus of shrill twitters as they flit hither and thither through the woods.  The first one to come near me was full of inquisitiveness; he flew back and forth past my head, exactly as chickadees do in a similar mood, and once seemed almost ready to alight on my hat.  “Let us have a look at this stranger,” he appeared to be saying.  Possibly his nest was not far off, but I made no search for it.  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.  Both of them contained young ones (March 31 and April 2), as I knew by the continual goings-in-and-out of the fathers and mothers.  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.  The place itself was a sufficient novelty,—­the place and the summer weather.  The pines murmured overhead, and the palmettos rustled all about.  Now a butterfly fluttered past me, and now a dragonfly.  More than one little flock of tree swallows went over the wood, and once a pair of phoebes amused me by an uncommonly pretty lover’s quarrel.  Truly it was a