SPOTTED FLYCATCHERS 



LEARNING TO FLY 



As song dies down in June the abundance of bird life 

 increases ; and in the last three weeks in the month the 

 garden shrubberies and other favourite nesting-places are 

 more densely peopled than at any other time of year. The 

 wave of birth has risen to its full height, and the forces of 

 destruction are only beginning to make away with the 

 annual superfluity. In a garden where many birds build, 

 there may easily be twenty-five times as many birds present 

 at midsummer as at the beginning of the nesting season in 

 March and early April. The resident birds have been 

 reinforced by many visitors and migrants, and the parents 

 are outnumbered by their young. The first young thrushes 

 and blackbirds of the April broods are now as large and 

 almost as active as their fathers and mothers ; and the 

 stock of the young birds of the year ranges from these 

 lusty marauders of the fruit-beds to the last young wrens. 



But owing to the inertness of most young birds even 

 after they have left the nest, it takes some time to realise 

 how thickly the bushes are peopled, and how unseen eyes 

 are gazing from every tree and tussock of undergrowth. 

 They are gazing, but not as a rule watching us ; and this 

 vagueness of attention is one reason why the bushes can 



