BLACK-HEADED BUNTING. Va 
that it is not by any means rare in perhaps most of our country 
districts. It often utters its not very musical cry seated on a 
tall spray in a hedge, and sometimes while flying along. The 
nest is always made very near the ground, if not actually on it, 
usually among stunted bushes or coarse herbage. It is made of 
roots, bents or coarser materials yet, and lined with hair. The 
Bunting lays four or five eggs, of a kind of stained-white ground, 
suggesting the idea that a vinous-red stain has been imperfectly 
washed off, and blotched and streaked and speckled, in the 
characteristic Bunting style, with shades of purplish brown, 
some of them rather dark. Though called Corn Bunting, it may 
be found where corn-fields are not abundant. I once met with a 
nest at the foot of St. Abb’s Head —Fig. 1, plate LV. 
93. BLACK-HEADED BUNTING—(2uberiza scheniclus). 
Reed Sparrow, Reed Bunting, Water Sparrow, Mountain Spar- 
row, Black-bonnet.—Not a rare bird anywhere in England, I 
believe, where water is not rare ; and very conspicuous from the 
dark head and bright plumage of the male. On the Essex 
marshes it is common enough, and so it is in the marshy or ill- 
drained meadows of other counties. Mr. Yarrell says the “nest 
is generally placed on the ground, among coarse long grass or 
rushes, at the foot of a thorn, or on the side of a canal bank.” 
The last I found was among, and supported by, the sedges 
growing at the side of a marsh-ditch in Hssex, and not less than 
ten or twelve inches from the hank—a site which I believe is not 
an unusual one. It is made of grasses, fragments of rushes, 
stalks of different plants, and lined sometimes with reed-down, 
or finer grasses and a little moss. I dislodged the male bird 
from the nest just named, and the eggs were perfectly warm to 
the touch. They would have been hatched ina few days. It was 
