unfurnished rooms are always available.

The sparrow usually monopolises these nesting sites. He is a regular
dog-in-the-manger, for he keeps other birds out of the holes he
himself cannot utilise. However, the sparrow is not quite ubiquitous.
In most large hill stations there are more houses than he is able
to monopolise.

I recently spent a couple of days in one of such, in a house situated
some distance from the bazaar, a house surrounded by trees.

Two green-backed tits (_Parus monticola_) were busy preparing a
nursery for their prospective offspring in one of the many holes
presented by the building in question. This had once been a
respectable bungalow, surrounded by a broad verandah. But the day
came when it fell into the hands of a boarding-house keeper, and it
shared the fate of all buildings to which this happens. The verandahs
were enclosed and divided up by partitions, to form, in the words
of the advertisement, "fine, large, airy rooms." There can be no doubt
as to their airiness, but captious persons might dispute their title
to the other epithets. A _kachcha_ verandah had been thrown out with
a galvanised iron roof and wooden supporting pillars. The
subsequently-added roof did not fit properly on to that of the
original verandah, and there was a considerable chink between the
beam that supported it and the wall that enclosed the old verandah,
so that the house afforded endless nesting sites. An inch-wide crack
is quite large enough to admit of the passage of a tit; when this
was negotiated the space between the old and the new roof afforded
endless possibilities. Small wonder, then, that a pair of tits had
elected to nest there.

The green-backed tit is one of the most abundant birds in the Himalayas.
It is about the size of a sparrow. The head is black with a small
perky crest. The cheeks are spotless white. The back of the head is
connected by a narrow black collar with an expansive shirtfront of
this hue. The remainder of the plumage is bright yellow. The back
is greenish yellow, the rest of the plumage is slaty with some dashes
of black and white. Thus the green-backed tit is a smart little bird.
It is as vivacious as it is smart. It constantly utters a sharp, not
unpleasant, metallic dissyllabic call, which sounds like _kiss me_,
_kiss me_, _kiss me_, _kiss me_. This is one of the most familiar
of the tunes that enliven our northern hill stations.

So much for the bird: now for its nest. A ne