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But to return to the Pied Flycatcher which I shall not venture to leave 

 again, after having been enticed into so long a digression at the very outset of my 

 paper. By whatever route this little bird travels, there is at least no doubt that 

 it reaches the neighbouring counties of Wales in considerable numbers. It is a 

 regular summer resident in the grounds of a house belonging to a cousin of mine 

 near Builth. Mr. Cambridge Phillips, of Brecon, who has compiled a list of the 

 Birds of Breconshire, in the Zoologist, says that it builds every summer in his own 

 garden, and is common in his neighbourhood. And in the north of the same 

 county, near the borders of Cardiganshire, I had the pleasure of constantly 

 seeing it during a short stay there last June. 



It is, in fact, a bird which seems to have a curious preference for the more 

 mountainous parts of our island, without being itself in any real sense a mountain 

 bird. It is especially fond of the Lake country ; and the best description we have 

 of its habits may be read in an excellent little book on the " Birds of Cumberland," 

 by my friend the Rev. H, A. Macpherson. It is met with sometimes in the 

 flatter counties of England, but rarely stays to pass the summer there. Last 

 spring I was told that a pair had appeared near Oxford, in such a spot as might 

 well have tempted them to remain ; but it was in vain that I looked for the con- 

 spicuous little black and white birds — the miniature Magpies, as they have been 

 very aptly called. One Sunday morning in April, 1886, as I was taking a stroll 

 before church in the precincts of my Oxfordshire village, I descried a white 

 object on a willow-bough some hundred yards away. As my sight is not good, 

 you may imagine that it would need to be a very white object that could catch 

 my eye at that distance. As usual, I had a binocular with me, and at once 

 discovered that bit of brilliant snowy white to be the breast of a Pied Flycatcher. 

 Its mate was at hand— for these birds seem to come to us ready paired — and 

 they spent the whole of that day catching flies from railings, apple trees, and 

 stone walls in the seclusion of the Rector's glebe land, where I found them ; 

 but even the protection of Mother Church could not induce them to stay, and 

 they departed the very next day, probably in the direction of Wales. Since 

 then I have always done them the honour of looking for them on any sunny 

 morning in my Easter vacations ; but for some reason best known to themselves 

 they have never, to my knowledge, made another call on us. The truth seems to be, 

 that they like a wilder country than our English lowlands can offer them. When 

 I come to think of the various places in which I have seen them in the breeding 

 season, I cannot but be struck by the similarity of their surroundings in each case. 

 I well remember the spot in which I saw the bird for the first time. It was in the 

 Valley of Engelberg, just as you begin to mount the path to the Joch pass 

 through a steep wooded slope, at the foot of which are some sycamores of singular 

 size and beauty, whose stems, thickly clad with green moss and grey lichen, and 

 showing a russet patch here and there where the bark has peeled off, dwell always 

 in my mind as peerless specimens of Nature's colouring. It was on the lower 

 boughs of one of these trees, at the foot of the slope and just over a swift stream, 

 that I found the Pied Flycatchers in June, 1884. In June, 1888, while strolling 

 at the foot of a wooded slope in Breconshire, with a stream running below me, I 



