THE MARSH WARBLER'S MUSIC 205 



daily more intimate with, a new species. In this 

 instance it was nothing but a plain little brown bird, 

 plainer than the nightingale and hardly to be distin- 

 guished, even in the hand, from the familiar reed 

 warbler, but in virtue of its melody of a lustre surpassing 

 our blue kingfisher or indeed any shining bird of the 

 tropics. 



The colony was in a withy bed of a year's growth, 

 the plants being three or four feet high, the whole 

 ground being covered with a dense growth of tall 

 grasses and sedges, meadow-sweet, comfrey, and nettles. 

 It was moist and boggy in places but without water, 

 except in one small pool which served as a drinking and 

 bathing place to all the small birds in the vicinity. 



Sitting on a mound a few feet above the surface I 

 could survey the whole field of seven to eight acres 

 enclosed by high hedges and old hedgerow elm and oak 

 trees on three sides, with a row of pollarded willows 

 on the other, and I was able to make out about nine 

 pairs of marsh warblers in the colony. It was easy 

 to count them, as each couple had its own territory, 

 and the males were conspicuous as they were con- 

 stantly flying about in pursuit of the females or chasing 

 away rival cocks, then singing from the topmost twigs 

 of the withy-bushes. This, I found, was but one of a 

 group of colonies, the birds in all of which numbered 

 about seventy pairs. Yet it only became known in 

 quite recent years that the marsh warbler is a British 

 breeding species ! It had been regarded previously 

 as a chance or occasional visitor from the continent, 



