ps furnish the redbreasts with nesting places
suited to their taste; but they have a cunning way of plastering the
entrance above and below with pine pitch, so as to make it just large
enough to admit their tiny bodies and yet too small to let in their
enemies. In this respect they steal the laurels from their
white-breasted kinsmen, who seem to have no means by which to lessen
the dimensions of their natural doorways.

A still smaller member of this group is the brown-headed nuthatch
(_Sitta pusilla_), a resident of the South Atlantic and Gulf states, at
rare intervals wandering "accidentally" as far north as Missouri and
New York. A daintily dressed little fellow is this bird, the top and
back of his head a dark grayish brown with a whitish patch on the nape,
the remainder of his upper parts being bluish gray and his under parts
grayish white. His favorite dwelling places are in the pine woods of
the south, where he is on the most cordial terms socially with the pine
warbler and the red-cockaded woodpecker. A most active little body, he
scampers from the roots of the trees to the terminal twigs at the top,
inspecting every cone, cranny and knot hole, chirping his fine,
high-keyed notes, sometimes in a querulous tone, and again in the most
cheerful and good-natured temper imaginable, now gliding up a tree
trunk, now scudding down head foremost, anon circling in a spiral
course.

One autumn I found a number of these nuthatches associated with a flock
of myrtle warblers on the most sociable terms in a pine woodland not
far from Pensacola, Florida. Now they were up in the trees, now down
on the ground. All the while they were chirping in their most genial
tones. In a spring jaunt to southern Mississippi, I was fortunate
enough to find a nest in a half-decayed snag. It contained four of the
prettiest half-fledged bird babies that have ever greeted my sight.

Oddly enough, our tiny clamberers utter a loud, shrill alarm-call that
bears close resemblance to the querulous protest of the sparrow hawk as
you approach her nest or young. Doctor Chapman says of the brown
heads: "They are talkative sprites, and, like a group of school
children, each one chatters away without paying the slightest attention
to what his companions are saying."

The fourth member of the _Sittinae_ subfamily in America is the pigmy
nuthatch, known scientifically as _Sitta pygmaea_, a genuine westerner,
not known east of the plains. However,