o?i the Nesting of the Sprosser.



373



—the young Sprossers came along very fast; their tails grew to

almost full length, and they began to wave them up and down in

the dignified manner of their parents. The curious undulatory

action of the tail is very characteristic of this species, but is

rather hard to describe. Some idea of it may be conveyed by

comparing the tail to a fan spread out and held horizontally, one

coiner being then slowly depressed and the rest following with a

wave-like motion.


The Moult.


By the iotli July they were moulting fast and losing the

buff spots. What a strange thing is this moult of young birds

which have only recently left the nest and whose constitutions

cannot have hardened sufficiently, one would think, to withstand

this heavy tax on their vitality! Can the protection (if any)

afforded by the nestling plumage be a sufficient compensation

for the strain on the system, or is Nature so devoted to her

traditional procedure, so tied down by “ red-tape,” that she

cannot permit an embryo to quit an egg-shell and develop into

a young Sprosser without passing it through certain stages of

development reminiscent of its ancestry? I vote for the latter

explanation, because I cannot bring myself to believe that a

young Sprosser is appreciably less conspicuous when ticked with

buff spots than in its autumn plumage.


By the 14th the young birds had shed a large area of the

immature plumage, and the adults had lost their tails and looked

very ragged.


On the 20th, I was shown a young Nightingale, which had

been trapped, and noticed that it was not nearly so forward as

the young Sprossers.


I caught the Sprossers in the first week of August and

brought them into the house. The adults could be distinguished

by their longer beaks and by the warmer colour of the tail and

rump ; in other respects it was very hard to distinguish them.

General Remarks.


The Sprosser is certainly a very easy species to breed,

which fact has been especially brought home to me by some

humiliating failures this season with fine broods of species, such

as Garden Warblers and Whitethroats, which one would have



