2 1 6 E VOL UTION OF BIRD-SONG 



ton Terrace, Stroud, a caged lark has been kept 

 for many years, and the bird has learned the calls 

 of canaries which are kept by a neighbour, also the 

 call of the brown wren, some notes of the great tit, 

 tree-pipit, and yellow bunting, which notes it repeats 

 in an almost incessant song. I have heard a sedge- 

 warbler in a marsh, about 120 yards distant from, 

 but within easy hearing of the lark, singing phrases 

 closely like those of that bird. 



The most remarkable song of the sedge-warbler 

 noted by me was uttered at ten o'clock at night, 

 near Chalford. A bird of this species was singing on 

 the other side of a roadside wall, and some few feet 

 down a bank. As I looked over the wall the song 

 ceased ; and I waited, watching the bush whence 

 the sounds had proceeded. Suddenly I heard the 

 cry of a chaffinch — the call employed in flight — so 

 loud, and yet so rapidly diminishing in force as the 

 cry was repeated, that I felt certain a chaffinch had 

 been startled from the bush — an unusual occurrence 

 under the circumstances — and, more strange still, 

 had uttered its call-note as it flew far out over the 

 valley. I prepared to make a note of this, and 

 actually took out my note -book for the purpose. 

 Suddenly I heard precisely the same cries — the loud 

 call fading away — as though a second finch were 



