THE YELLOW BUNTING. [ 9 



and marking, although most of them exhibit the purplish black characters which 

 have earned for this bird the title of " Scribbling Lark." In tint they vary from 

 greenish-white, through greyish-lavender, to pale rosy-brownish ; whilst one egg, 

 taken by my brother Frank, in Cornwall, was bright sienna-red, with a single 

 irregular blackish line across one side, and somewhat resembles a rare form of the 

 egg of the Tree Pipit (Plate III, fig. 100). On two occasions I have taken the 

 greenish white egg almost or entirely without markings, the first time I only 

 secured the first egg (as I had to return to town the following day) on the second 

 occasion I obtained a clutch of three ; four elliptical eggs in one clutch were dull 

 greenish-white, one of them with only a few delicate hair-lines, a second with a 

 single additional rectangular line across the lower third enclosing a second shorter 

 club-shaped line, the two other eggs were fairly normal in marking ; another nest 

 of four is slightly tinted with lavender, the markings are mostly fine, and look 

 like tangled silk, mixed with a few thicker streaks of purplish black, one of these 

 eggs is almost a perfect sphere ; other greenish eggs have extraordinary markings 

 (like written notes in music, oriental letters, or the little men which children 

 sometimes draw on their slates) intermixed with finer scrawlings and patches of 

 lavender ; the lavender tinted eggs chiefly differ in being clouded with a deeper 

 shade of the same colour, often at the larger end ; one egg which I obtained 

 vaguely resembles that of a Chaffinch, being of the same size and with very few 

 linear markings, only the diffused patches are greyish lavender, instead of looking 

 like blood-stains. 



The number of eggs in a clutch varies from four to five, four being the 

 commoner number ; if less are obtained in an incubated condition, either the first 

 nest has been destroyed before the completion of the clutch, or one or more eggs 

 abstracted or broken accidentally. During incubation the hen bird sits very close ; 

 so that frequently you may almost tread upon the nest in stepping through tangled 

 brushwood; then fferrelup ! that sound of hurried flight familiar to the birds-nester, 

 makes you suddenly look to catch a glimpse of the startled bird rounding a bush, 

 or passing over a hedge ; and in a minute you are crouching down and turning 

 aside the foliage to look at its treasures : often when searching among brambles 

 and hawthorn have I felt my hand brushed by the wing of this bird as it has 

 started from its nest. 



I am satisfied that three, if not four, broods are reared in a year : the male 

 is said, on good authority, to assist the female in incubation, but in every instance 

 in which I have flushed the bird from the nest, it has invariably been the hen ; 

 indeed the male has always been singing somewhere close by. It is well-known 

 that the hens of many species as they grow old assume a plumage closely resernb- 



VOL. II. T 



