The prince of American ornithologists, Dr. Elliott Coues, has somewhere said that he would travel a long distance to discover a new kind of bird, or even to ascertain a new fact about a familiar species. I would applaud and echo that sentiment, for by all means let us have bird news that really is news, instead of revamping the familiar facts again and again, as some amateurish writers do. While I am not able to add any new species to science, I have made note of many pleasing incidents in the bird realm, and these, I venture to hope, may be of not a little general interest. [Illustration: Pewee, or Phoebe (missing from book)] There is the companionable white-breasted nuthatch which goes scudding up and down the tree trunks with as much ease and aplomb as a fly gliding over a window-pane. I have already told you something about him. I had long been aware that he wedged grains of corn, sunflower seeds, and kernels of nuts in the crannies of the bark; but one day he invented a trick that was a surprise to me. It occurred at a summer resort in northern Indiana, where I noticed a nuthatch hitching up and down and around the slender stem of a sapling, pausing at intervals to thrust something into the crevices of the bark. My curiosity led me to pry into the bird's affairs. Stepping smartly forward, I drove him away, not heeding his vigorous protest of "yank, yank," and examined the bark of the sapling. What did I discover? A colony of black ants were scuttling up and down the tree, apparently under stress of great excitement; and good reason they had, for here and there one of their number was tightly wedged into a chink of the bark, often doubled up into a bow or an angle. They were not killed, at least not all of them, for they were still wiggling their legs and antennas; but they were evidently benumbed, or some of their backs were broken, and they were fastened so securely in the fissures that they could not escape. Does it not look as if the forehanded nuthatch was laying by a supply of ants for a coming time of hunger? One day a family of wood pewees visited the dooryard of my tent. A multitude of gnats circling about in the air, seemed to be precisely to the taste of the pewee parents and their hungry bairns. The bantlings sat chirping in the saplings, or flitted from twig to twig, twinkling their wings in the coaxing way that is characteristic of young birds, while the papa and mamma swung out into the air, nabbed the insects on the wing, and flew back to the trees, describing many circles, ellipses, and festoons of rare grace and beauty. The snapping of their mandibles could often be heard as they closed upon the fated insects. Most of the gnats thus captured were thrust into the mouths of the young birds, the parents dashing up to them and feeding them without alighting. As lavish a minstrel as the pewee _pater familias_ is under most circumstances, that morning he was too busy to tune his wind harp.