“If people who own gardens and farms, where there are no evergreen trees or hayricks for birds to hide in, would put up each fall little shelters of brush and branches, they would save a great many bird-lives, and their orchards would be freer from insects in the spring.  But, Dodo, you are not painting the word-picture of the Chickadee.  Haven’t you watched them long enough to think it out?”

“Y-e-s, I believe I have,” said Dodo slowly.  “I see a dear little bird about as big as a Chippy Sparrow, only fatter, and he is nice soft gray on top, about the color of my chinchilla muff.  He has a black cap on his head, that comes down behind where his ears ought to be, fastened with a wide black strap across his throat, and his face is a very clean white, and his breast, too.  That is, it is white in the middle, but the sides and below are a warmer color—­sort of rusty white.  And that’s all, except that he’s as fidgety as ever he can be,” ended Dodo, quite out of breath with her haste to tell all she could before the bird flew away.

“Do you think you will remember the Chickadee, while he is in the deep woods nesting this summer, so that you will know him again in the autumn?”

Dodo and Nat said they were quite sure they would, but Rap said:  “I’ve known him ever so long, only the miller called him a ’black-capped titmouse.’  Isn’t he a relation of the Nuthatch, Doctor?”

“Yes, a second cousin, and Black-capped Titmouse is one of his right names.  They used to belong to the very same family, but they had a little falling out, and are not now so intimate as they were before each went his own way, and acquired some different habits.”

“I thought they were alike in a good many things,” said Rap, “and their nests are something alike, too.”

The Chickadee

Length about five inches.

Upper parts ashy gray.

Head, back of neck, and throat, shining black.

Cheeks pure white.

Middle of breast white; sides and belly buffy.

A Citizen of the eastern United States.

A Tree Trapper.

THE BROWN CREEPER

“Another bird that, like the Nuthatch, spends his days peeping into the cracks of tree bark in search of food.  He is not a relation of the Nuthatch, but a lonely bird and the only one of his family in this part of the world.

[Illustration:  Brown Creeper.]

“He does not advertise his whereabouts as freely as do the Woodpeckers and other tree-trunk birds, so you will have to keep a sharp lookout to find him.  In the first place he is nearly the same color as the brown and gray bark upon which he creeps, the white under parts being quite hidden, and his call, which is the only note that is commonly heard, is only a little sharp squeaky ‘screek, screek,’ given as he winds his way up and around a tree-trunk, in the same way as a person would go up a circular staircase.