50 The Red-Spotted Bluethroat. 



their larvae and small seeds of weeds ; the young are fed very largely upon mos- 

 quitoes, which the parents capture on the wing, after the manner of Flycatchers. 



Seebohm gives the following full account of its song: — "On its first arrival 

 it often warbles in an undertone so low, that you fancy the sound must be 

 muffled by the thick tangle of branches in which you think the bird is concealed, 

 whilst all the time he is perched on high upon the topmost spray of a 3'oung fir, 

 his very conspicuousness causing him to escape detection for the moment. His 

 first attempts at singing are harsh and grating, like the notes of the Sedge- 

 Warbler, or the still harsher ones of the Whitethroat ; these are followed by several 

 variations in a louder and rather more melodious tone, repeated over and over 

 again, somewhat in the fashion of a Song-Thrush. After this you might fancy 

 the little songster was trying to mimic the various alarm-notes of all the birds 

 he can remember; the chiz-zit of the Wagtail, the tip-lip-tip of the Blackbird, and 

 especially the tvhit-whit of the Chaffinch. As he improves in voice, he sings 

 louder and longer, until at last he almost approaches the Nightingale in the 

 richness of the melody that he pours forth. Sometimes he will sing as he flies 

 upwards, descending with expanded wings and tail to alight on the highest bough 

 of some low tree, almost exactly as the Tree-pipit does in the meadows of our 

 own land. When the females have arrived there comes at the end of his song 

 the most metallic notes I have ever heard a bird utter. It is a sort of ting-tiufr, 

 resembling the sound produced by striking a suspended bar of steel with another 

 piece of the same metal." 



It is curious that the Rev. H. H. Slater should have stated that the Blue- 

 throat ''' co?nnunces^^ its song with the same metallic ting-ting; because, judging 

 from the few birds I have kept which uttered metallic sounds, I should have 

 expected the latter, and not Seebohm's version, to be the case. 



Gatke in his " Birds of Heligoland " observes : — " One would hardly believe 

 that the home of so lovely a creature as the Bluethroat extended so far north as 

 the coast of the Polar Sea, particularly as its beautiful azure blue and rusty 

 orange dress gives one the impression of its being a native of tropical latitudes. 

 As a matter of fact, its life is divided between its Arctic nesting stations and its 

 winter quarters, which extend to the hot regions of central Africa and southern Asia. 



The migratory flights of this little bird between regions so widely separated 

 have furnished the most interesting material towards a final solution of a hitherto 

 open question, viz : " What is the greatest speed attainable by a bird during its 

 migration flight ? and have yielded the astonishing result of one hundred and 

 eighty geographical miles per hour."* 



* This statement has since been called in question by scientific Ornithologists. 



