WARBLER 1021 
by its different song, and comparatively seldom does it stray from 
the reed-beds which are its favourite haunts. In them usually it 
builds one of the most beautiful of nests, made of the seed-branches 
of the reed and long grass, wound horizontally round and round so 
as to include in its substance the living stems of three or four reeds, 
between which it is suspended at a convenient height above the 
water, and the structure is so deep that the eggs do not roll out 
when its props are shaken by the wind.’ Of very similar habits is 
the REED-THRUSH or great Reed-Warbler, 4. arwndinaceus, a loud- 
voiced species, abundant on the Continent but very rarely straying 
to England. Much interest also attaches to the species known in 
books as Savi’s Warbler, Potamodus luscinioides, which was only 
recognized as a constant inhabitant of the Fen-district of England 
a few years before its haunts were destroyed by drainage. No 
example seems to have been obtained in this country since 1856. 
Its nest is peculiar, placed on the ground and formed of the blades 
of Glyceria so skilfully entwined as to be a very permanent struc- 
ture, and it is a curious fact that its nests were well known to the 
sedge-cutters of the district which it most frequented, as those of a 
bird with which they were unacquainted, long before the builder 
was recognized by naturalists.2 In coloration the bird somewhat 
resembles a Nightingale (whence its specific name), and its song 
differs from that of any of those before mentioned, being a long 
smooth trill, pitched higher but possessing more tone than that of the 
Grasshopper-Warbler, Locustella nvia, which is a widely-distributed 
species throughout the British Isles, not only limited to marshy 
sites, but affecting also dry soils, inhabiting indifferently many 
kinds of places where there is tangled and thick herbage, heather 
or brushwood.? The precise determination of this bird—the Grass- 
hopper-Lark, as it was long called in books, though its notes if once 
heard can never be mistaken for those of a grasshopper or cricket, 
and it has no affinity to the Larks—as an English species is due to 
the discernment of Gilbert White in 1768. In its habits it is one 
of the most retiring of birds, keeping in the closest shelter, so that 
it may be within a very short distance of an eager naturalist without 
his being able to see it,—the olive-colour, streaked with dark brown, 
of its upper plumage helping to make it invisible. The nest is 
very artfully concealed in the thickest herbage. The foreign 
1 Of late years the nearly-allied MarsH-WARBLER, A. palustris, is said to 
have been recognized in several parts of England, but I have not seen a specimen 
obtained in this country or had the good fortune knowingly to hear its song, which 
all agree in saying is very different from that of the Reed-Wren. 
2 See Yarrell, Br. B. ed. 4, i. pp. 389-397, where the history of the species 
was first told. 
3 In those parts of England where each of the two species last mentioned was 
formerly most abundant it was known as the Reel-bird or Reeler (p. 779). 
