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, in the Rocky Mountain district he is an abundant species, his range east and west being from the plains to the Pacific coast, and north and south from the Canadian boundary to the mountains of Mexico. Swinging and gliding about among the pines, performing the same antics as his eastern kinsmen, he utters a cheery whistle, that may be translated, "Whit, whit, whit." His movements are often so rapid that he is difficult to follow with the eye as he flits from one tree to another or dashes amid the branches. He scarcely remains quiet long enough for you to note his markings and settle his identity, but once you are sure of him, you will never mistake him for another bird.