294 SAXICOLA CENANTHE. 



The stony slopes of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Craigs, in 

 the King's park, near Edinburgh, are favourite resorts of the 

 Wheatears ; and there, although they are much disturbed by 

 boys, their manners may be satisfactorily studied with little 

 trouble. So abundant are they in Harris that the boys regu- 

 larly search the walls every year in the beginning of May for 

 their nests, of which great numbers are destroyed, the object of 

 the plunderers being to procure the eggs for food. I have often 

 joined in these expeditions, and in that district never found the 

 nest elsewhere than in holes in the stone walls. But in the 

 sandy pasture tracts along the shore, the nests are often found 

 in deserted rabbit-holes. The materials of which the nest is 

 composed vary according to the locality. It is bulky, with a 

 rather shallow cavity ; its exterior formed of grasses and fibrous 

 roots, intermixed with mosses of various kinds, the interior of 

 moss, hair, wool, and feathers. One taken from a stone wall 

 at the base of the Pentland Hills, was composed of stalks and 

 roots of grasses, fibrous roots of other herbaceous plants, and a 

 large proportion of liypna, the interior being of mosses of va- 

 rious genera, chiefly hypna, several feathers of the Wood 

 Pigeon, two or three quills of Parus coeruleus, and a consider- 

 able quantity of horse hair and wool. Another obtained in 

 West Lothian is hemispherical, rather compact, composed of 

 straws and fibrous roots, the latter predominating internally, 

 and mixed with hair and wool, with a few ducks' feathers ; its 

 external diameter four inches and three quarters, the internal 

 two and three quarters. The eggs are from four to seven, of 

 an elongated oval form, sharpish at the small end, light greenish- 

 blue, without spots, averaging ten-twelfths in length, and seven- 

 twelfths in their greatest breadth. 



The young are abroad from the middle of ]\Iay to that of 

 June ; and a second brood is generally reared before the end of 

 July. Thus, on the 7th June 1832, I saw in the King's Park 

 at Edinburgh two families of Wheatears, of which I shot three 

 young individuals ; on the 2d September of the same year, I 

 saw a flock of young birds with their parents on the top of a 

 hill near Selkirk ; and on the 15th August 1834, chased a 

 similar assemblage near the lower part of Manner Water in 



