MANY leagues of land and sea lie between these Taconic Hills and Georges Bank yet a glimpse of WHITE-BREAST and I am again on those jade gray waters. And the manner of my going back to those old days and places is easily explained.
The bird "quanking" head down the maple trunk is short, thick-set and friendly curious — so was "Tubs," my dorymate on the Banks. He was a Maine boy who "wanted to know" about nearly everything in the world except fishing. I answered all the queries I could — a mighty small percentage of the bombardment — and left him wondering. The main question has been answered, tho, for some flowers they scatter on the water in memory of the lost belong to him. Perhaps the Nuthatch is his reincarnation, a ghost of my shipmate who has mistaken the Taconics for his own Maine hills of home.
The Latin name of the bird is entirely misleading. He is anything but a "sitter," and is almost as industrious as the Chickadee and more frequently hunts "upsidedown" than that bird. This faculty of standing on their heads with such facility is due principally to the extreme development of the hind toe and the stubby tail, neither stiff nor pointed like the Woodpecker's. They explore the under side of a horizontal limb which does not impede turning by catching in bark, as readily as the top, the law of gravitation flouted by the firm grip of the scimitar rear claw.
Self-sufficient and even-tempered they "tend to their knitting," thereby offering example worthy of emulation by the alleged higher forms of life.
Hunger sometimes makes them quarrelsome (me too) and they will drive larger birds away from a feeding station with threats of impalement on the rapier bill.
North America east of the plains. Breeds in Canadian, Transition and Upper Austral zones from northern Minnesota, central Ontario, southern Quebec and Newfoundland south to northern parts of Gulf States.