Houses & Gardens 17 



when for the most part nothing but buds, purple 

 or green, are glistening in the sunshine after a sharp 

 thunder -shower, the male blackcap can easily be 

 seen, hopping about amongst the sycamores, thorn 

 bushes, and laburnums of the garden shrubbery. 

 Don't mistake for him an ox-eye or a coal-titmouse, 

 both of which have black heads. The blackcap is 

 a true " warbler," with upper parts of olive-grey, and 

 under parts of delicate pearl colour. His lady's head 

 has a cap of bright brown, in the place of his glossy 

 black one. Where the mock-orange bushes grow in 

 the wild garden, or the foxgloves and tall campanulas 

 spring up in a tangle of flowering grasses and perhaps 

 nettles, there the blackcap's nest is concealed ; nor is 

 it easily found, for if the bird flies from it when you 

 are quite close by, she will flit away so silently and un- 

 observantly, that you may never notice her departure ; 

 a frail nest of dried grasses, compacted with spider's 

 webbing and lined sparingly with a little horsehair, 

 built, as a rule, within three or four feet of the ground. 

 Blackcaps never venture away from the thick recesses 

 of the wild garden ; yet even if those hiding-places are 

 bounded by walls and buildings, such as are many of 

 the gardens of the Oxford Colleges, they will take up 

 their abode there spring after spring. 



Then, too, the garden warbler, a gracefully formed 

 little bird, with unpretentious grey-brown plumage 

 and a very sweet though not particularly noticeable 

 song, is fairly abundant, as is also the willow wren, 

 a small person which builds a semi-domed nest of 

 grass lined with feathers on the ground amongst ivy 



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