378 BRITISH BIRDS. 
._.. The nest perfectly resembles that of the Grasshopper Warbler *, but 
is closer built, and its colour is darker and greyer; it is also more 
smoothly finished outside. It is as deep as the nests of other Reed- 
Warblers, neatly rounded, with the upper edge bent inwards. The 
materials are principally dry leaves and stalks of fine grass, mixed with 
grass and the fibres of nettles and other plants, and often with insect- 
webs, all somewhat carefully woven together, in some places almost felted 
together. Inside it is lined with very fine grass and a considerable quantity 
of horsehair.” 
The two nests from Taunton were suspended between stems of the 
meadow-sweet. They are composed almost entirely of fine round grass- 
stalks mixed with a few dry grass-leaves and some kind of downy fibre. 
One of them is somewhat sparingly lined with black horsehair; and the 
other is lined with a spray or two of green moss, upon which a profuse 
covering of black horsehair is placed, coming up to the outside rim. The 
inside is beautifully rounded and deep, the inside diameter being about 
2} inches and the depth 1? inches. 
The Marsh-Warbler breeds only once in the year; but if the nest 
be disturbed it soon makes another. Pralle told me that he once found 
a nest of a Marsh-Warbler on an island in one of the parks near Hanover 
containing fresh eggs, which he took. A week afterwards he revisited the 
place, and found a second nest with eggs close by the old site. He also 
took these eggs, and was surprised to find that in the course of another 
week a third nest had been built, in which the birds successfully reared a 
brood. 
The number of eges varies from five to seven; and in the colour and ~ 
>} an) 3 
character of the markings they present two very distinct types, the one 
apparently as common as the other. The first type has the ground-colour 
pale greenish blue, with surface-spots and blotches of olive-brown and 
underlying markings of violet-grey. The peculiarity of this type is that 
most of the spots are underlying ones, the overlying spots being fewer and 
smaller. Each of these olive surface-markings generally contains a spot 
of darker brown in the centre. The second type somewhat more nearly 
approaches the eggs of the Reed-Warbler, being of a greenish-white ground- 
colour, richly marbled, blotched, and spotted with olive-brown, and haying 
a few very dark brown specks. In this type the underlying markings are 
few and usually small. In both types most of the markings are distributed 
* Dresser, in his ‘ Birds of Europe,’ also notices the resemblance of the nest to that of 
the Grasshopper Warbler ; but the paragraph in which the remark occurs is so obviously 
a free translation of Naumann that it cannot be regarded as independent evidence. I haye 
not seen many nests of either of these birds; but in all that I have seen, the nest of 
the Acrocephalus is built of round grass,and the nest of the Locusfella of flat grass. 
al 
