GRASSHOPPER LARK. FLY-CATCHER. 63 



my journals. The legs of the larger of these two are flesh- 

 coloured ; of the less, black. 



The grasshopper lark began his sibilous note in my fields 

 last Saturday.* Nothing can be more amusing than the 

 whisper of this little bird, which seems to be close by, though 

 at an hundred yards' distance ; and, when close at your ear, is 

 scarce any louder than when a great way off. Had I not 

 been a little acquainted with insects, and known that the 

 grasshopper kind is not yet hatched, I should have hardly 

 believed but that it had been a locusta whispering in the 

 bushes. The country people laugh when you tell them that 

 it is the note of a bird. It is a most artful creature, 

 skulking in the thickest part of a bush, and will sing at a 

 yard distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to 

 get a person to go on the other side of the hedge where it 

 haunted ; and then it would run, creeping like a mouse 

 before us for an hundred yards together, through the bottom 

 of the thorns ; yet it would not come into fair sight ; but in 

 a morning early, and when undisturbed, it sings on the top 

 of a twig, gaping and shivering with its wings. Mr. Bay 

 himself had no knowledge of this bird, but received his 

 account from Mr. Johnson, who apparently confounds it 

 with the reguli non cristati, from which it is very distinct. 

 See Eay's Philos. Letters, p. 108. 



The fly-catcher (stoparola) has not yet appeared: it 

 usually breeds in my vine. The redstart begins to sing : 

 its note is short and imperfect, but is continued till about 

 the middle of June. The willow- wrens (the smaller sort) 

 are horrid pests in a garden, destroying the pease, cherries, 

 currants, &c., and are so tame that a gun will not scare 

 them.f 



* Sylvia locustella. Lath. Grasshopper-warbler. Selby's Ornith. "W. J. 



f* This sentence has probably been the cause of the murder of numbers of 

 these most innocent little birds, which are in truth peculiarly the gardener's 

 friends. My garden men were in the habit of catching the hens on their nests 

 in the strawberry beds, and killing them, under the impression that they made 

 great ravage among the cherries ; yet I can assert that they never taste the 

 fruit, nor can those which are reared from the nest in confinement be induced 

 to touch it. They peck the aphides which are injurious to the fruit trees ; 

 and being very pugnacious little birds, I have sometimes seen them take post 

 in a cherry-tree, and drive away every bird that attempted to enter it, though 

 of greater size and strength. 



The birds which are mistaken for them are the young of the garden-warbler^ 



