Be this as it may, the style of architecture that finds favour in the hills is quite a godsend to the birds, or rather to such of the feathered folk as nestle in holes. A house in the Himalayas is, from an avian point of view, a maze of nesting sites, a hotel in which 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.