I assured him that he was mistaken, that I had heard the cry of the bird
many times, and had even heard it once at a distance since our
conversation began. Hearing that distant cry had caused me to ask the
question.

All at once he remembered that he knew, or had known formerly, the
wryneck very well, but he had never learnt its name. About twenty or
five-and-twenty years ago, he said, he saw the bird I had just described
in his orchard, and as it appeared day after day and had a strange
appearance as it moved up the tree trunks, he began to be interested in
it. One day he saw it fly into a hole close to the ground in an old
apple tree. "Now I've got you!" he exclaimed, and running to the spot
thrust his hand in as far as he could, but was unable to reach the bird.
Then he conceived the idea of starving it out, and stopped up the hole
with clay. The following day at the same hour he again put in his hand,
and this time succeeded in taking the bird. So strange was it to him
that after showing it to his own family he took it round to exhibit it
to his neighbours, and although some of them were old men, not one among
them had ever seen its like before. They concluded that it was a kind of
nuthatch, but unlike the common nuthatch which they knew. After they had
all seen and handled it and had finished the discussions about it, he
released it and saw it fly away; but, to his astonishment, it was back
in his orchard a few hours later. In a few weeks it brought out its five
or six young from the hole he had caught it in, and for several years it
returned each season to breed in the same hole until the tree was blown
down, after which the bird was seen no more.

What an experience the poor bird had suffered! First plastered up and
left to starve or suffocate in its hollow tree; then captured and passed