


NESTS AND EGGS. 
material, interwoven with mosses of several species, which are 
fresh and green, curiously interwoven with fibrous roots and 
hair of various animals; the imner surface is spherical, and 
smooth as a piece of felt, some three inches in diameter, and 
it is arched over with fern leaves and straws. To the height 
of two inches there is a lining of soft large feathers, chiefly 
pheasants and wood-pigeons’ with a mixture of ducks’ 
feathers. The oblong aperture in front is low and arched, 
two inches wide by one and a half in height; its lower edge 
formed of slender twigs, herbaceous stalks and grasses, the 
filing or plastermg bemg “ made good,” as a workman would 
say, m a very workmanhke manner. 
Some wren’s nests are without the internal layers, and en- 
tirely of the hypna moss, others have the lining of the feathers 
of the domestic fowl ; and far away from human habitations, in 
the wild glens of the Grampians, the nest is found, in some 
rocky chink, in which an Alpine torrent flows between rough 
heathery banks, with overhanging blueberry twigs. Nor does 
the wren disdain altogether the haunts of men for its nest: a 
hole in a wall, in the thatched roof, in a tree, in an ivy-covered 
wall; in fact, it is not capricious im its choice, but readily 
adapts itself to circumstances. 
The eggs (fig. 15), five or six in number, are extremely 
delicate and pretty, of a rounded oval form, four-sixths of an 
inch in length and half an inch in thickness; pure white, 
with some scattered dots and streaks of light red at the 
larger end, but varying in number of dots in different eggs 
even of the same nest. 
The CHAFFINCH is a constant resident on the skirts of such 
plantations as we have been describing; avoiding the depths of 
the woods, and especially fir-plantations, orchards, and hedge- 
rows,—the outskirts of copses and groves are its most favoured 
haunts. In the fork of a shrub, often on a tall tree, on the 
ivy-covered wall, or in a thick hawthorn hedge, its nest will 
frequently be found. Externally, it is composed of moss, covered 
with ashy-coloured lichens and interwoven with hairs and woolly 
fibres ; its interior is lined with feathers, mixed with cow and 
horse’s hairs, and the seed-down of such plants as the thistle. 
The eggs (fig. 1) are four or five in number, of a regular 
oval form, about three-fourths of an inch long and half an inch 
thick, of a purplsh-white or rather a reddish-grey colour, 
shehtly spotted with reddish brown, with a few irregular lines 
of the same hue. 
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