330 THE BLUE TIT. 



persisted until they were allowed to finish and rear their young. 

 One singular feature was, when the keeper himself opened the 

 box the bird raised its wings and angrily hissed at hirn ; but 

 when his niece opened it (as was generally the case) the bird 

 allowed her to stroke its head. Letters and papers were often 

 lying right over the bird and nest, and sometimes she pushed 

 some of them out of the letter hole by which she entered. I 

 got a nest in a dyke at Balmungo with sixteen eggs, and one in 

 a beam hole in the old flour mill on the Kenly Burn, also with 

 sixteen eggs ; but the usual number is seven or eight. I pulled 

 out the rotten stump, laid the nest bare, and counted the eggs. 

 I took five and left the rest; they were pretty round, ^ 16 by 

 | an inch, pink, and speckled over with red spots. The nest was 

 composed of dry grass, fine roots, and moss, lined with hair and 

 feathers. To show they are not nice where they build, I got 

 one with eight eggs in a crevice on the movable gasometer at the 

 harbour. On June 13th, 1889, when the new Burgh School 

 was building at Abbey Park, I got a nest in the old dyke by 

 watching the bird, with small green caterpillars in her bill, fly 

 down and enter a small hole betwixt the pointing of the cope- 

 stones. I saw the young ones, but could not reach them 

 without taking off the cope. They stretched up their heads and 

 gaped, expecting food. I saw the old bird again on the 20th 

 with caterpillars ; on looking into the hole I saw nothing. I 

 thought they had flown ; but on peering closer, I detected them 

 huddling close with their heads down, instead of gaping — a 

 habit with all young birds just before flying. I think the tits 

 are unjustly accused of destroying buds, for in the spring of 

 1886 I noticed some blue tits peering and pecking among the 

 fruit-buds of an old pear tree in my garden. Anxious to see if 

 they were pecking the buds — as they really seemed to be — I 

 climbed up, and found the buds and leaves literally covered 

 with small green caterpillars, about half an inch long, so, instead 

 of injuring the buds, the active little birds were saving them 

 from being destroyed and the leaves stripped by thousands of 

 these crawling pests ; and to show how many will be destroyed 

 by a brood of tits, a patient naturalist, Mr Weir, got up at half- 

 past two a.m., on the 4th of July, for the express purpose of 

 counting how often a pair fed their young during the day. 

 He says — 



" At half-past three they began to feed their young, six in number ; from 

 then till four o'clock they fed them twelve times ; from four to five, twenty- 

 five times ; five to six, forty times ; six to seven, twenty-nine times ; seven 



