SPOTTED FLYCATCHER. 183 



THE SPOTTED FLYCATCHER is one of the latest, but, at 

 the same time, one of the most regular of our summer 

 visitors. White of Selborne remarks, even more than 

 once, in his miscellaneous observations published in the 

 second volume of Mr. Jesse's Gleanings, that the Spotted 

 Flycatcher arrives on the 20th of May. Mr. Selby says, 

 this bird seldom makes its appearance till the oak-leaf is 

 partly expanded, and it begins to form a nest immediately 

 on its arrival. It frequents orchards, gardens, lawns, and 

 pleasure-grounds, and is not a little remarkable for the 

 singularity of the places in which it sometimes makes its 

 nest. It is also believed that the same pair of birds return 

 to occupy the same spot for several years in succession. 



In the first volume of the Magazine of Natural History, 

 a notice appears of a pair of Flycatchers that formed their 

 nest on the head of a garden-rake left by accident near a 

 cottage. Mr. Blackwall has mentioned an instance of a 

 pair that built their nest in a bird-cage, which had been 

 left with the door open suspended from the branch of a 

 tree in a garden. Mr. Atkinson, in his Compendium of 

 Ornithology, says, " we recollect a pair having built on the 

 angle of a lamp -post in one of the streets of Leeds, and 

 there rearing their young." Mr. Jesse, in the second part 

 of his Gleanings, mentions a nest of this Flycatcher, which 

 was found on the top of a lamp near Portland-place in 

 London, having five eggs in it, which had been sat upon. 

 This nest, fixed in the ornamental crown on the top of 

 the lamp, as described, I saw at the Office of Woods and 

 Forests, in Whitehall -place. 



The more usual places for this bird's nest are, the side 

 of a faggot-stack, a hole in a wall, or on a beam in an out- 

 building, whence arises one of its provincial names, that of 

 Beam-bird ; it also frequently fixes its nest on a branch 

 of a pear-tree, a vine, or a honeysuckle, when trained 



