when he is most
loquacious. A high pitched, clear, ringing note, repeated without
variation several times, is his most often-heard call or song. He will
sometimes sit motionless on his perch, repeating this call at short
intervals, for half an hour at a time. Another bird at a distance will
be doing the same, and the two appear to be answering one another. He
also has another call, not so loud and piercing, but more melodious: a
double note, repeated two or three times, with something liquid and
gurgling in the sound, suggesting the musical sound of lapsing water.
These various notes and calls are heard incessantly until the young are
hatched, when the birds at once become silent."

The nesting habits of _caesia_ are quite similar to those of our
American forms, with the following interesting exception: The doorway
of the cavity constituting the bird's domicile is plastered up with
clay, made viscid by the nuthatch's glutinous saliva, leaving in the
center a circular hole just large enough to afford entrance and exit
for the little owner. Says the author quoted above: "When the sitting
bird is interfered with, she defends her treasures with great courage,
hissing like a wryneck, and vigorously striking at her aggressor with
her sharp bill." Like our common white-breast, the British bird may be
attracted to human dwellings by furnishing him a regular supply of food
suited to his taste, and may grow so trustful as to come when called,
and even to catch morsels thrown to him in the air. In the forest he
often hammers so loudly on a resonant branch that his tattoo is
mistaken for that of a woodpecker. The interior of the nest "contains
a bed of dry leaves, or the filmy flakes of the inner bark of a fir or
cedar, on which the eggs are laid."

In northern Europe another form of the nuthatch guild is found, known
scientifically as _Sitta europea_, whose under parts are white without
any washing of buff on the breast.

The Levant furnishes a most charming addition to the feathered
brotherhood now under consideration. The scientific gentlemen have
christened it _Sitta syriaca_, and its common name is the rock
nuthatch, an appellation that is most appropriate, for its chosen
haunts are rocky cliffs, over the faces of which it scuttles in the
most approved nuthatch fashion, head up or down, as the whim seizes it,
clinging with its sharp claws to the chinks, ledges, protuberances, and
rough surfaces of the rocky walls.