WHITE-RUMPED SWALLOW. 579 



jured, or taken possession of by sparrows. It was a continued 

 treat to see the lively creatures feeding their young and skim- 

 ming over the grass in search of insects. He informed me 

 that very frequently they reared only one brood, and that in 

 very dry seasons they found great difficulty in building their 

 nests, a pair of them having -worked one summer three weeks 

 in his bed-room window, without accomplishing their object. 



Most commonly the nest of this swallow is placed in the 

 upper corner of a window, often also under the eaves of out- 

 houses, and in similar situations, where it is sheltered from 

 above, sometimes on the face of a rock, whether on the sea- 

 shore or inland. The only instance of the latter kind of situa- 

 tion which has occurred to me was in an old limestone quarry, 

 at the Roman Camp, near Dalkeith. When in the corner of 

 a window, it is of a rounded form externally, flat on the adher- 

 ing sides, rectangular above, and has a roundish or transversely 

 oblong aperture at the top, almost always on the sheltered side, 

 or that next the middle of the window. I have seen several 

 instances in which the aperture was at the outer edge of the 

 window, and sometimes it has a kind of neck, or the mouth 

 projects an inch or more. The nest is usually large, having an 

 external diameter of from six to eight inches. The outer part 

 of one examined by me at Bield Inn, in Tweedsmuir, in 

 August 1834, consisted of pellets of friable sandy mud, not in 

 the least glutinous, intermixed with small, generally angular 

 pebbles or gravel. Into this outer crust were thrust numerous 

 straws or fragments of stems of grasses, which became free in- 

 ternally, and were circularly disposed. Within was a layer of 

 wool, partly interwoven with the straw, and lastly a thick bed 

 of large feathers of the domestic fowl. Another nest from a 

 village near Edinburgh, is six inches in diameter externally. 

 The outer shell is a solid mass of fine loam, which has been 

 built of pellets in the form of soft mud, so that the outer sur- 

 face presents horizontally compressed mammillae. The average 

 thickness of this crust is seven-twelfths of an inch. It is quite 

 friable, and if any glutinous matter has ever been intermixed 

 with the mud, it has entirely disappeared, but it is in some 

 measure held together by a considerable intermixture of short 



