THE FINCHES 107 



dark or snow-clad pine-tree in the forests where these birds love to 

 build, he circles a little above it, smiting his wings above his back, and 

 then, with fanned tail and swelled plumage, sinks slowly down again to 

 where the hen sits admiring. This, it will be seen, is a very similar 

 exhibition to that of the greenfinch, yet, as probably in all such cases, 

 there are marked points of difference between the two, the latter bird 

 endeavouring with success to make itself outre by a novel method of 

 flight, whilst the former achieves the same result both through this and 

 the additional (or perhaps more pronounced) expedient of dilating 

 the plumage, which gives it a curious puffy appearance that shows 

 strangely in the air. 



Mere shadow of the redpolls, a vanishing gleam of the linnet, the 

 twite is a bird which, in his building proclivities, really does show a 

 marked preference for the British Isles, since, with the exception of 

 some others, less famous in history, off the west coast of Norway, and, 

 more sparingly, the adjacent mainland, with now and then a honeymoon 

 in Sweden or North Russia, he would seem to breed nowhere else. The 

 locality, however, must be suitable, by which he understands moors, 

 heaths, and such like desolate, wild places, owing to which isolation 

 his clutches, as I would fain hope, often escape those of the collector, 

 however scientific ; nor was it, indeed, till towards the end of the 

 seventeenth century that he himself, even, was, most unfortunately, 

 discovered, and booked as a British species. For his own sake and 

 mine I could wish that he still lived incognito, or that, since he 

 must be so restricted, he had chosen some comfortable spot in the 

 Desert of Sahara or at the North or South Pole, from whence, his 

 non-British-laid eggs having performed their true function, he might, 

 with comparative safety, have repaired to us during the later months 

 of the vear. 



%> 



However, he breeds with us, in which connection may be men- 

 tioned a curious habit which this bird seems, in some parts of Eng- 

 land, to have acquired, of decorating his somewhat rude nest with one 

 or, at most, with two feathers, being usually the hackle feathers of the 



