Upper plumage reddish grey, irregularly spotted and lined with brown and black; a broad black and brown band from the back of the head to the back; throat and breast yellowish red, with dusky transverse rays; rest of the under plumage whitish, with arrow shaped black spots; outer web of the quills marked with rectangular alternate black and yellowish red spots; tail-feathers barred with black zigzag bands; beak and feet olive brown. Length six inches and a half; breadth eleven inches. Eggs glossy white.
The note of the Wryneck is so peculiar that it can be confounded with none of the natural sounds of the country; a loud, rapid, harsh cry of _pay-pay-pay_ from a bird about the size of a lark may be referred without hesitation to the Wryneck. Yet it is a pleasant sound after all--'the merry pee-bird' a poet calls it--and the untuneful minstrel is the same bird which is known by the name of 'Cuckoo's Mate', and so is associated with May-days, pleasant jaunts into the country, hayfields, the memory of past happy days and the hope of others to come. This name it derives not from any fondness it exhibits for the society of the cuckoo, as it is a bird of remarkably solitary habits, but because it arrives generally a few days before the cuckoo. Not less singular than its note is its plumage, which, though unmarked by gaudiness of colouring, is very beautiful, being richly embroidered as it were with brown and black on a reddish grey ground. In habits, it bears no marked resemblance to the Woodpeckers; it is not much given to climbing and never taps the trunks of trees; yet it does seek its food on decayed trees, and employs its long horny tongue in securing insects. It darts its tongue with inconceivable rapidity into an ant-hill and brings it out as rapidly, with the insects and their eggs adhering to its viscid point. These constitute its principal food, so that it is seen more frequently feeding on the ground than hunting on trees. But by far the strangest peculiarity of the Wryneck, stranger than its note and even than its worm-like tongue, is the wondrous pliancy of its neck, which one might almost imagine to be furnished with a ball and socket joint. A country boy who had caught one of these birds on its nest brought it to me on a speculation. As he held it in his hand, I raised my finger towards it as if about to touch its beak. The bird watched most eagerly the movement of my finger, with no semblance of fear, but rather with an apparent intention of resenting the offer of any injury. I moved my finger to the left; its beak followed the direction--the finger was now over its back, still the beak pointed to it. In short, as a magnetic needle follows a piece of steel, so the bird's beak followed my finger until it was again in front, the structure of the neck being such as to allow the head to make a complete revolution on its axis, and this without any painful effort. I purchased the bird and gave it its liberty, satisfied to have discovered the propriety of the name Torquilla.[20] I may here remark that the name Iynx,[21] is derived from its harsh cry. Besides this, the proper call-note of the bird, it utters, when disturbed in its nest, another which resembles a hiss; whence and partly, perhaps, on account of the peculiar structure of its neck, it is sometimes called the Snake-bird. Nest, properly speaking, it has none; it selects a hole in a decaying tree and lays its eggs on the rotten wood. Its powers of calculating seem to be of a very low order. Yarrell records an instance in which four sets of eggs, amounting to twenty-two, were successively taken before the nest was deserted; a harsh experiment, and scarcely to be justified except on the plea that they were taken by some one who gained his livelihood by selling eggs, or was reduced to a strait from want of food. A similar instance is recorded in the _Zoologist_, when the number of eggs taken was also twenty-two. The Wryneck is a common bird in the south-eastern counties of England and to the west as far as Somersetshire; but I have never heard its note in Devon or Cornwall; it is rare also in the northern counties.