Another little hole-nesting bird, an alien not often seen, is "the cuckoo's mate," the wryneck, a bird of very pretty plumage, mottled and barred, and yet curiously inconspicuous when clinging to a tree-trunk. Should you chance upon its nest it will twist its neck about in an extraordinary snake-like way and hiss, a procedure which in other countries may sometimes, perhaps, protect the small creature from capture, but in England, where tree-snakes are not common objects of the country, can hardly do the wryneck any good. At other times, too, it will pretend to be dead when you take it up, as the corn-crake will, but as soon as it sees a chance of escape it is off. [Illustration: NESTING-HOLE OF WRYNECK] But when a bird is heard tapping in garden or orchard, it must not be taken for granted that the workman is either a nuthatch or a wryneck, for the "great tit," the "oxeye" of many country places, has the same habit of fixing nuts or seeds in crevices and hammering at them with its bill till they split, and it will also search the bark of trees with its beak in quest of insects. But above all the birds of our English gardens, not excepting the sparrow (which, though an insolent is not a fearless bird) and the robin, the great tit confides in man and in all his doings. I wrote once in a magazine an account of how I had caught the same great tit nine times in one afternoon, had nine times put it into an aviary, and nine times had found, on going to look for it, that it was gone. And a newspaper critic of my article suggested that I had been mistaken or something worse. But a year later I found that I had Dr. Günther with me; for in an article written by him, now before me, he says that he has caught the same great tit over and over again, and that at last the bird, discovering that nothing disagreeable resulted, coolly went on eating while the trap snapped over him. My own experience was in the hard winter of 1892. I had put out a long row of traps, and visitors were very numerous. Among them came a great tit which was caught and put into the aviary, and to cut the story short, nine times a great tit was caught and nine times put into the aviary. But when in the afternoon we went to look at the captives, there was not a great tit among them all. Then the thought flashed upon me that we had been catching the same bird over and over again. Then we caught another great tit, and this time, before letting it go, we marked its tail, and sure enough the next great tit we caught had its tail marked. So instead of putting it into the aviary we fixed the trap open to let it eat its fill of chopped fat and hemp-seed without molestation.