THE MARSH WARBLER'S MUSIC 207 



flying about in pursuit of the females or chasing away 

 rival cocks, then singing from the topmost twigs of the 

 withy-bushes. This, I fcnnid, was but one of a group 

 of colonics, the birds in all of which numbered ab(jut 

 seventy pairs. Yet it only became known in quite recent 

 years that the marsh warbler is a British breeding 

 species! It had been regarded previously as a chance or 

 occasional visitor from the continent, until Mr. VVarde 

 Fowler discovered that it was a regular summer visitant 

 to Oxfordshire, also that it was the latest of our 

 migrants to arrive and a later breeder by several weeks. 

 It is curious that in a small country so infested with 

 ornithologists as ours this species should have been over- 

 looked. They, the ornithologists and collectors, say that 

 it is not so, that a bird with so beautiful a song, so 

 unlike that of his nearest relations the reed and sedge 

 warblers, could not have been overlooked. Undoubtedly 

 it was overlooked, and this colony, or group of colonies, 

 numbering seventy or more pairs, must be quite an 

 ancient one. There are others too in Somerset, and no 

 doubt many besides in the west country and midlands. 

 The species has not diffused itself more in the country, 

 I imagine, on acc(nmt of its habit of nesting almost ex- 

 clusively in the withy beds, where their nests are as 

 much exposed to destruction as those of the skylark 

 and land-rail in the corn. The moist grounds where the 

 willows are planted are covered annually with a luxuriant 

 growth of grasses and herbage w^hich must be cut down 

 to give air and life to the willows. The cutting usually 

 takes place about mid-June when the eggs are being laid 



