The Whitkthroat. 63 



nest is always flimsy, for I have taken examples almost as stoutly built as that 

 of a Sedge Warbler ; nor is the nest always situated in so apparently perilous a 

 position as a bunch of nettles, for I have often taken it from the top of a clipped 

 hawthorn hedge partly overgrown with iv}' ; but it is most frequently found low 

 down in bramble or dense but loose vegetation and more often than not near the 

 foot of a thick hawthorn hedge. 



The nest is usually lightly constructed of dried stalks of plants and grasses 

 with here and there knots of spider's silk or sheep's wool ; the lining is composed 

 of fine bents and horsehair : it is generally ver^' deep. Of ten nests in my 

 collection, obtained during two consecutive years, two are interesting ; one on 

 account of its unusual size, the diameter of the interior of tlie cavity measuring 

 nearly three inches, and thickly lined with black hair ; the other has the walls 

 rather thickly edged with sheep's wool intertwined with the grasses. 



The eggs, which usually number from four to five, rarel}^ six, vary a good 

 deal in ground-tint and in marking; the best known type is greenish, indistinctly 

 mottled with greyish olive, the larger end zoned with spots and specks of slate- 

 grey and brown ; another not uncommon variety resembles the egg of the Garden 

 Warbler excepting for a belt of scattered slate-grey spots towards the larger end, 

 a third variety is stone-grey with slightly darker mottling and looks almost like 

 a diminutive egg of the Pied Wagtail ; a fourth, somewhat larger, is similarly 

 coloured, but spotted and splashed as if with ink ; then there is a dark mottled 

 greyish form, almost like a small egg of the Titlark; a pale ruddy variety with 

 greyish mottling, reminding one of the Spotted Flycatcher's egg, and a greenish 

 white egg with scattered brown mottling speckled with blackish, and vaguely 

 resembling some eggs of Passer; rarely its eggs are almost like enlarged editions 

 of those of the Lesser Whitethroat, but with the surface between the blackish 

 markings splashed and speckled with olive brown. The above are a few of the 

 forms taken by myself, and it would not be difficult to add to the list, indeed an 

 assiduous collector never seems to come to the end of variation in this egg, 

 either in size, form, ground-tint, or pattern : I have one almost like that of the 

 Dartford Warbler, but nearly spherical ; others which, had I not taken them my- 

 self, I should have declared to be large eggs of the Sedge Warbler laid by an 

 old bird, yet I took them from a most typical flimsy Whitethroat's nest, built in 

 nettles : they are almost large enough for eggs of the Garden Warbler. Many 

 even of the best collections give a very poor idea of the modifications to which 

 this bird's eggs are liable, and the published descriptions seem, so far as I have 

 been able to judge, to have been copied from one ornithological work into another, 

 most authors speaking of specimens being pale buff, or huffish white, spotted with 



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