8 8 Summer Studies of Birds and Books CHAP. 



There was indeed no reason why it should not suit 

 them, for in the Alps the cover which they affected 

 was hardly so high or so dense as this ; but argu- 

 ing from the ways of the Nightingale, which always 

 abandons a wood of which the undergrowth has been 

 cleared in the winter, I felt instinctively that the 

 chance of success would this year be a doubtful one. 

 And so it proved ; up to the middle of June I failed 

 to catch even a fragment of the song, and instead of 

 it the osier-bed began to resound with the whirring 

 reel of the Grasshopper Warbler, a bird which I had 

 never before heard so close to the village. I consoled 

 myself as well as I could by watching this little 

 curiosity performing from the top twig of a sapling 

 on many a warm evening after sunset. 



On 20th June I was returning from a hot stroll, 

 and languidly leaning over a gate some half mile 

 further up the valley, when my eye chanced to fall 

 on a spot which instantly suggested itself to me as 

 the ideal place for a Marsh Warbler. It was a small 

 bed of osiers, overgrown for the most part, sheltered 

 on one side by a high railway embankment, and on 

 the other by rising cultivated ground ; between it 

 and the railway was a deep ditch of running water. 

 It occurred to me as quite possible that my friends 

 of last year might have found a home here ; and here 

 in another five minutes I found them. Clearly in 

 these parts an overgrown withy-bed is what they 



