12 SPRING 



are rather more leisurely, and it is exceptional to find such 

 early broods ; but many sets of their eggs are hatched by 

 the beginning of April in sheltered box-bushes or the ivy 

 on a warm corner of the garden wall. Blackbirds are 

 earlier than thrushes only in a very hard season. Owing to 

 their way of finding food among the leaves in sheltered 

 ditches, they suffer much less from hard frost ; and the end 

 of a bitter spell of winter weather finds 

 them far less reduced in strength and 

 numbers, and ready to begin nesting 

 at almost the usual time. At the end 

 of the famous frost which broke up 

 gradually in March 1895, the blackbirds 

 Kittili'JfT'^r-'. "£fF ,aM * m a Gloucestershire garden abounding 

 tt%^ '-.N with birds were almost as numerous as 

 V^'-k usual, and had several nests with eggs 

 T/^.3 by the end of the month. Far worse 

 was the plight of the song-thrushes. 

 Only one pair of survivors mustered spirit to attempt to 

 nest before the last week of March ; and they built no new 

 nest, but laid a scanty set of three eggs in an old one. 



A difficulty which often besets song-thrushes building 

 in a dry or frosty March is the scarcity of mud for their 

 plastered lining. Rotten wood is often used as an alternative 

 to mud, and is found specially serviceable in arid springs. 

 But even a decayed stump needs a certain amount of 

 moisture to make it easily workable, and thrushes are 

 sometimes driven to curious devices. In the same March 

 of 1895, a nest was found in a Berkshire wood with a 

 large triple bramble leaf almost covering the inner hollow 

 above a scanty smear of mud. In dry stony thickets the 

 mud lining is sometimes abandoned altogether, and the nest 

 is lined with long stringy moss wound round and round, 



