4 6 SPRING 



By the beginning of April the first broods of song-thrushes 

 are usually the only young birds of the year already fledged 

 and abroad. In a few days the first missel-thrushes, black- 

 birds and robins follow them ; we find their nests already 

 empty, and coated with the grey scales of skin detached by 

 the sprouting quills. Soon we find nests with young broods of 

 hedge-sparrows, blind and fuzzy and black ; for in the warm 

 haunts where they have lived comfortably all the winter these 

 unobtrusive birds also build very early among the thorns and 

 evergreens. About the same time we see the first rooks 

 bringing food to the tree-tops in the village ; they will be a 

 fortnight or three weeks later in the outlying hedges and 

 woods. In hollow trees the brown wood-owl and the stock- 

 dove are sitting on their white eggs, now opaque and dis- 

 coloured with incubation. Brown owls begin to lay almost 

 as early as song-thrushes, but they sit for nearly twice as long 

 before the first young hatch. Now and then we find ring- 

 doves' as well as stock-doves' eggs before the end of March, 

 and their young early in April ; but this is an exception, 

 and a mark of the general prolificacy of this rapidly multiply- 

 ing species. Stock-doves nest in warm holes, and therefore 

 can afford to begin early ; but ring-doves build slight, un- 

 covered nests in the open boughs, and do not normally lay 

 their eggs until the second half of April, or even May, when 

 the weather is milder. The same home-keeping habit 

 which enables the resident thrushes and robins and hedge- 

 sparrows of the garden to fall to building in March is also 

 seen among a few of the moorhens on the pools. When they 

 have spent the winter in peace and comfort, undisturbed by 

 the necessity of migration, they too will be sitting on their 

 large brown-spotted eggs very early in April. The earliest 

 moorhens nest when the reeds are huddled and dead, the 

 hawthorn-twigs above the sheltering stumps are still bare, 



