THE MARSH-WARBLERS 85 



the surrounding birds." Also M. 1'Abbe Caire, quoted in the same 

 work : " This species sings most admirably, imitating with exactitude 

 the notes of the goldfinch, the chaffinch, and the blackbird, as well 

 as all the other birds which frequent its neighbourhood. Its song 

 is richer in variation than that of the nightingale, and it can be 

 listened to from morning till night." 



Is it possible that such a bird can have been overlooked, as 

 has been suggested so often during the last few years in Ornithological 

 journals ? The facts point rather to gradual establishment a slow 

 up-hill struggle that has resulted in it becoming a rare annual visitor 

 to two or three counties, and an occasional straggler to others. It is 

 more delicate than the reed-warbler, and rarer than that species 

 wherever it occurs, and its establishment in a fresh country or district 

 would on that account be slow and uncertain. If we presume, as 

 there is good reason for our doing, that they arrive in their nesting 

 quarters unpaired, the males preceding the females, then the chance 

 of females finding the spots chosen by the males must be considerably 

 less in the case of a scarce than a fairly numerous species ; this refers 

 of course to localities not previously occupied for nesting purposes. 

 Even if the similarity of the bird to the reed-warbler may have caused 

 it to pass unnoticed, or its nest to be accepted as a loosely constructed 

 reed-warbler's in a somewhat unusual situation, the eggs, strikingly 

 distinct from those of any other British bird, would have led to its 

 identification. And moreover, the song so enthusiastically described 

 by continental and English observers surely cannot have been mis- 

 taken for that of the reed-warbler by the many good field-workers in 

 this country of the last seventy or eighty years. 



