it seems, a sharp investigatory glance. He then flies away.
"A nut-hatch, also, I twice see hammering at the cones, in much the same manner as the tit, and, having loosened a thin brown flake from one of them, he flies off with it in his beak. I have not yet seen the tit do this, nor did I ever see him get an insect. If he got anything at all, it must have been in one of the actual blows, become a peck, as when he hammers at a cocoa-nut hung in the garden. The greenfinches never hammered, but only bit and tugged at the clubs of the cones. Brown flakes often fell down from them, but I never saw the birds fly off with these, as the nuthatch has done. I had seen one with a flake in his bill which, however, he soon let fall to the ground.
"One of the greenfinches is again attacking the cones, and I can now see the way he does it more plainly. He places his beak between the clubs of the cones at their tips (I mean their outer ends), and then moves his head and beak rapidly, seeming, as it were, to flutter with his head, and as he does this you hear the grating, vibratory sound. All the time, he is clinging head downwards to the side of the cone, quite a feat for so large, at least for such a stout-built bird. I will not, however, be quite sure that it is to the cone itself that he clings. The fir-needles hang in bunches near them, and his claws may be fixed amongst these, though I do not think so, or, at least, not always. Besides this sound made with the beak on the fir-cones, there is another, which one often hears, and which is usually, I think, made by the greenfinch. To get at the cones, he often flies up underneath them, and hangs a little, thus, before clinging, on fluttering
