RUSTIC BUNTING. 31 



not unfrequently to the South of France and Northern 

 Italy. Naturalists have long hesitated whether the Mitilene 

 de Provence, figured in the ' Planches Enluminees' (656, 

 fig. 2*), was not this species, and to judge from the plate 

 so it was ; but the belief of De Montbeillard and some others 

 in its being a native of the countries bordering on the 

 Mediterranean is assuredly an error. It was said by 

 Temminck to occur in the Crimea, but this is probably 

 one of the random assertions to which he was prone, and 

 the authority on which it was made is not stated. 



Of the habits of this bird little has been recorded. They 

 would seem on the whole not to differ much from those of 

 the Reed-Bunting ; but Messrs. Alston and Harvie Brown 

 state that the specimens they procured near Archangel 

 were found in marshy pine-woods and in openings in the 

 forest places which would hardly be frequented by that 

 species. They add that its call-note resembles that of its 

 congener; but other observers have likened the sound to 

 that produced by very different birds the Redwing and 

 Redbreast for example. Disregarding, for the reasons before 

 assigned, the account given by Schrader, nothing seems to 

 be positively known as to its nidification. An egg pro- 

 fessedly belonging to this bird, in the possession of the 

 Editor, measures *84 by *6 in. and is of a pale greenish- 

 white, patched with dull ash-colour and streaked and spotted 

 with dark olive much resembling certain varieties of those 

 which the Lapland Bunting occasionally lays. 



Few of the Buntings bear confinement well, but M. 

 Barthe'lemy-Lapommeraye kept an example of this species in 

 an aviary for two years, and Mr. Keulemans, the draughtsman 

 to whom the present edition of this work is indebted for the 

 foregoing figures of this and some of the other species now 

 for the first time introduced, had an example for more 

 than eighteen months in a cage. It was a cock-bird, and 

 was bought by him at Amsterdam in October 1868, but made 

 its escape in England in April 1870 ; while in the year last 



* On this figure is founded the JEmberiza lesbia of J. F. Gmelin (Syst. 

 Nat. if p 382). 



