SUMMER VISITOES TO THE NEIGHBOUEHOOD. 9 



His song is rather like an audible shiver, which begins slowlj 

 and then seems to get hold of the bird so that he cannot stop 

 himself. The call note is a most beautiful sound, and you 

 can hear it to perfection if you go to the Leigh Woods at the 

 end of May when the hen is sitting on the nest, and walk 

 about under the trees in which the cock bird is singing. He 

 is soon very anxious, and instead of the song you will hear a 

 long plaintive note which is so full of anxiety that you can- 

 not help feeling sorry for being the cause of it. If you go 

 too near the nest, the hen will slip off it very likely without 

 being seen, and you will know that she has done so by hear- 

 ing two birds crying in the trees instead of one. To find 

 the nest you must sit down quietly a little way off and 

 watch ; it requires careful watching, for the hen has a 

 habit of suddenly dropping to the nest from some height 

 above the g'round, and if she succeeds in escaping your 

 notice when doing this, all must begin again. 



The nest is generally in a slight hollow in a bank, some- 

 times wonderfully hidden, like the willow wren's, but with 

 one peculiar difference. The chiffchaff and willow wren 

 invariably line their nests with feathers, whereas the wood 

 wren uses no feathers at all. For some reason or other 

 wood wrens dislike feathers, or perhaps they are not so 

 far advanced as their cousins and have not yet discovered 

 that feathers are of use for nest-building. I shall always 

 remember one afternoon in that oak glade in Shirehampton 

 Park some years ago, when I watched a cock wood wren 

 feeding his hen as she sat on the nest. How he hovered in 

 the air above the nest and quickly darted down to it and up 

 again is more than I can describe. You are not likely to 

 meet any other member of this family near here at present, 

 but if you go to the Alps you will find a little bird rather 

 like our wood wren abundant on the mountain slopes where 



