A little bird comes flitting silently from the willows and perches on the drooping beech branch.  It is a delicate little creature, the breast of a faint and dull yellowy green, the wings the lightest brown, and there is a pencilled streak over the eye.  The beak is so slender it scarce seems capable of the work it should do, the legs and feet so tiny that they are barely visible.  Hardly has he perched than the keen eyes detect a small black speck that has just issued from the arch, floating fast on the surface of the stream and borne round and round in a tiny whirlpool.

He darts from the branch, hovers just above the water, and in a second has seized the black speck and returned to the branch.  A moment or two passes, and again he darts and takes something—­this time invisible—­from the water.  A third time he hovers, and on this occasion just brushes the surface.  Then, suddenly finding that these movements are watched, he flits—­all too soon—­up high into the beech and away into the narrow copse.  The general tint and shape of the bird are those of the willow wren, but it is difficult to identify the species in so brief a glance and without hearing its note.

The path now trends somewhat away from the stream and skirts a ploughed field, where the hedges are cropped close and the elms stripped of the lesser boughs about the trunks, that the sparrows may not find shelter.  But all the same there are birds here too—­one in the thick low hedge, two or three farther on, another in the ditch perching on the dead white stems of last year’s plants that can hardly support an ounce weight, and all calling to each other.  It is six marsh tits, as busy as they can well be.

One rises from the ditch to the trunk of an elm where the thick bark is green with lichen:  he goes up the tree like a woodpecker, and peers into every crevice.  His little beak strikes, peck, peck, at a place where something is hidden:  then he proceeds farther up the trunk:  next he descends a few steps in a sidelong way, and finally hops down some three inches head foremost, and alights again on the all but perpendicular bark.  But his tail does not touch the tree, and in another minute down he flies again to the ditch.

A shrill and yet low note that sounds something like ‘skeek-skeek’ comes from a birch, and another ‘skeek-skeek’ answers from an elm.  It is like the friction of iron against iron without oil on the bearings.  This is the tree-climber calling to his mate.  He creeps over the boles of the birch, and where the larger limbs join the trunk, trailing his tail along the bark, and clinging so closely that but for the sharp note he would be passed.  Even when that has called attention, the colour of his back so little differs from the colour of bark that if he is some height up the tree it is not easy to detect him.