ON THB NATURAL HISTORY OF THE NIGHTINGALE. 37 



difficult to discover, the colour of the eggs, and also of the young 

 birds, being exactly that of the ground, or rather of the decayed 

 leaves, among which, under covert of a thick bush, it is most 

 usually concealed. 



Courtship. — As is the case with most other feathered musicians, 

 the male Nightingale first establishes himself in some convenient 

 «nd suitable spot ; and the wandering females are attracted to him 

 •by the melody of his voice ; both sexes (as I will presently shew), 

 in all probability returning, for the most part, to the exact locality 

 they had left the previous autumn : so that, likely enough, the very 

 «ame pair not unfrequently proceed again together with the busi- 

 ness of nidification. 



Nidification. — The nest is composed externally of decayed leaves, 

 similar to those which cover the ground around it, and which ap- 

 pear to have been laid on wet, that they might adhere the better 

 together. The specimen now before me, is thus of a tolerably com- 

 pact structure ; but sometimes they are very frail. It is lined, first, 

 generally, with skeleton leaves, which most writers seem to have 

 mistaken for small rootlets, and over these is laid a little dry grass, 

 and, sometimes, horse-hair. The eggs are from four to six in num- 

 ber, (and, not unfrequently, these are not all hatched), of a green- 

 ish brown colour, which is sometimes broken into small spots, which 

 ^re of course darker upon a lighter ground, and are thickest at the 

 large end. They vary considerably in size. About fourteen days are 

 required to hatch them, and the young are, in their first plumage, 

 mottled, and not very unlike a young Robin 5 each feather of the 

 ^lpper parts having a pale spot at the tip, and those of the under 

 being edged with black. They never breed more than once in 

 the season ; and when a nest is discovered much later than the 

 'Usual time, some accident must have certainly happened to a former 

 brood. 



^iie of the Nest. — Bechstein, a rather celebrated German writer 

 in this department of natural history, but who studied the habits of 

 birds more as observed under the restraints of captivity than as free 

 denizens of the groves and hedges, describes the Nightingale's nest 

 to be " built in a grove or orchard, among a heap of branches, or 

 on a thorn bush, or the trunk of a tree surrounded by briars ; or 

 even on the ground, where it may be hidden by tall grass, or thick 

 bushes." The last mentioned is the only situation whereon I have 

 ever known it to be placed, nor can I find a single British author 

 who corroborates the former part of this account. The nest is 

 hardly, in fact, sufficiently coherent to be placed elsewhere than on 



