HISTORY OF THE SWIFT. 171 



ther. With all my attention to these birds, I have never been 

 able once to discover one in the act of collecting or carrying in 

 materials : so that I have suspected (since their nests are exactly 

 the same) that they sometimes usurp upon the house-sparrows, 

 and expel them, as sparrows do the house and sand-martin ; well 

 remembering that I have seen them squabbling together at the 

 entrance of their holes ; and the sparrows up in arms, and much 

 disconcerted at these intruders. And yet I am assured, by a nice 

 observer in such matters, that they do collect feathers for their 

 nests in Andalusia ; and that he has shot them with such mate- 

 rials in their mouths.* 



Swifts, like sand-martins, carry on the business of nidification 

 quite in the dark, in crannies of castles, and towers, and steeples, 

 and upon the tops of the walls of churches under the roof ; and 

 therefore cannot be so narrowly watched as those species that 

 build more openly : but, from what I could ever observe, they 

 begin nesting about the middle of May ; and I have remarked, 

 from eggs taken, that they have sat hard by the ninth of June. 

 In general they haunt tall buildings, churches, and steeples, and 

 breed only in such : yet in this village some pairs frequent the 

 lowest and meanest cottages, and educate their young under those 

 thatched roofs. We remember but one instance where they 

 breed out of buildings ; and that is in the sides of a deep chalk- 

 pit near the town of Odiham, in this county, where we have seen 

 many pairs entering the crevices, and skimming and squeaking 

 round the precipices. 



As I have regarded these amusive birds with no small atten- 

 tion, if I should advance something new and peculiar with re- 



* It is difficult to know exactly what to say in this instance, -where my own observation is 

 directly contradictory to what is advanced by Mr. White. It certainly is possible that the swift 

 may sometimes usurp the domicile of a house-sparrow ; but that it should not afterwards arrange 

 the nest after its own fashion, and that its eggs should be laid on the comparatively unfinished 

 structure of the sparrow, is at variance with all that I have seen of its economy. That Mr. 

 White never observed the swift collecting building materials may be at once accounted for by 

 the fact that, like the eave-swallow, it often returns to its former nest for many seasons in sue* 

 cession ; but that it ordinarily collects its own materials, and that it forms of them a very firm 

 " crust, or shell," are most undoubted facts, the latter of which is sufficiently exemplified in a 

 number of specimens now lying before me. These are composed, for the most part, of small soft 

 pieces of hay and straw, more or less intermingled with vegetable pappus and downy feathers, all 

 of which might have been obtained while on the wing in windy weather. One of them has a frag- 

 ment of newspaper, and another a small birchen twig, worked up into the structure; and all of them 

 are very firmly cemented with large quantities of a viscous substance, either secreted by the inter- 

 nal glands of the bird, as is the common opinion, or at all events elaborated from some gelatinous 

 vegetable substance, as is known to be the case with the nests of the hirundo esculenta. The swift 

 is very tenacious of the place it has once selected for nidification, and, if deprived of its nest, will 

 construct another in the course of a few days, every bit as solid and substantial as that which 

 had been taken away. ED. 



