358 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



stealers of eggs, and must often find an easy prey in the 

 missel-thrush's conspicuous nest when it is built in open 

 hedgerows and copses. Crows usually avoid the close 

 neighbourhood of houses, where they expect to find 

 enemies with guns ; and the missel-thrush's shyness of 

 mankind is overcome by its mistrust of the crow. It is 

 probably owing to the same reason that rookeries are so 

 often built close to man's dwellings. Crows are great 

 robbers of rooks' nests, though rooks are their own close 

 kin. As rookeries are usually in warm and sheltered places, 

 rooks are some of the earliest birds to pair and nest. 

 Ravens also nest from year to year in the same site, and are 

 as early breeders as the earliest rooks, though they haunt 

 wilder and bleaker regions. But crows do not build until 

 late March or early April ; and this seems to be due at least 

 in part to their being usually prevented from settling per- 

 manently in one spot, and compelled to discover a retreat 

 where there seems a chance of being undisturbed. 



Another step forward in the year's progress towards 

 spring is marked by the first singing of the chaffinch. So 

 large a part of the whole volume of song in England is 

 supplied by this most plentiful and animated bird that the 

 chorus before its singing-time is necessarily thin. Before 

 the middle of February the gay and vivacious ditty begins to 

 ripple from the orchard fruit-trees or the hedgerow elms ; 

 sometimes, when an exceptionally bright and warm morning 

 follows a long spell of gloom and cold, the song of the 

 chaffinches seems to break out in a positive torrent. But 

 the song is not always complete at once. It consists of a 

 run of rapid notes ending in a kind of flourish or twirl ; and 

 when the chaffinch first begins to sing, he cannot always 

 accomplish it perfectly. The notes become slurred and 

 confused, and the bird stops in the middle, tripping over its 



