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. A little larger than its European cousin, its markings are quite similar. In Syria it is common as far north as the southern shores of the Black Sea. Although somewhat shy, it is described as having "sprightly manners and a clear, ringing trill." Odd indeed are some of nature's evolutions, I had almost said caprices, for the rock nuthatch is just as much at home and apparently just as happy on its bleak precipices as is our merry whitebreast in his umbrageous home in the oak or maple forest.