us 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 swa