172 THE NATURAL HISTORY [LETT. 



gardens and orchards, and make great havoc among the summer 

 fruits. 



The blackcap has in common a full, sweet, deep, loud, and 

 wild pipe; yet that strain is of short continuance, and his 

 motions are desultory ; but when that bird sits calmly and 

 engages in song in earnest, he pours forth very sweet, but 

 inward melody, and expresses great variety of soft and gentle 

 modulations, superior perhaps to those of any of our warblers, 

 the nightingale excepted. Blackcaps mostly haunt orchards 

 and gardens ; while they warble, their throats are wonderfully 

 distended. 



The song of the redstart is superior, though somewhat like 

 that of the whitethroat : some birds have a few more notes 



BLACKCAP'S EGG. WHITETHROAT'H EGG. 



than others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall tree in 

 a village, the cock sings from morning till night: he affects 

 neighbourhoods, and avoids solitude, and loves to build in 

 orchards and about houses ; with us he perches on the vane 

 of a tall maypole. 



The flycatcher is of all our summer birds the most mute and 

 the most familiar ; it also appears the last of any. It builds in 

 a vine, or a sweetbriar, against the wall of a house, or in the 

 hole of a wall, or on the end of a beam or plate, and often close 

 to the post of a door where people are going in and out all day 

 long. This bird does not make the least pretension to song, but 

 uses a little inward wailing note when it thinks its young in 

 danger from cats or other annoyances : it breeds but once, and 

 retires early. 



Selborne parish alone can and has exhibited at times more 

 than half the birds that are ever seen in all Sweden ; the former 

 has produced more than one hundred and twenty species, the 



