14 WASTE-LAND WANDERINGS. 



pursued the warbler, secured the nesting stuff as it fell, 

 and carried it in triumph to its unfinished nest. 



As we have seen, the little redstart, unlike the inter- 

 rupted thrush, could not sit still, and so it is ahva)^s. I 

 can only think of them as twisting, turning, and run- 

 ning, creej^er - like, around the branches, varying these 

 movements continually with sudden sallies into the air, 

 yet never so far absorbed in insect-hunting as not to 

 find time to utter a few clear notes, worthy to be called 

 a song. 



Probably no one of the warblers captures, daily, so 

 many insects as does this species. I tried once to count 

 the clickings of a redstart's beak, and so estimate the 

 number of flies that it caught, in a given time ; but it 

 proved a hopeless task. The bird's beak snapped with 

 all the regularity and nearly the rapidity of the ticking 

 of my watch. It was making a most unsubstantial meal 

 from a cloud of May-fiies. What warbler, besides this, 

 can gracefully turn a somersault, and often does so, either 

 for convenience or fun ? It is the erratic flight of the 

 pursued insects that has taught the redstart to perform 

 this remarkable aerial manoeuvre ; and yet it is diflicult 

 to see how this circular course could be of use. Often, 

 I believe, it is a mere matter of play, for the thoughts 

 of the redstart do not run exclusively in the one prosy 

 groove of eating. 



Often, in early summer particularly, I have seen the 

 bird fly directly out from an outreaching branch, then 

 close its wings and dive downward and backward, and 

 reopen its wings as it mounted upward again. The 

 course of the flight was an elongated oval, and the bird 



