408 INSECTIVOR^E. 



very accurate descriptions of it handed down from times at 

 which the habits, and even the forms of birds, were but 

 imperfectly known. 



The nest is a structure formed by the patient and inces- 

 sant labour of both birds for at least a month, even in those 

 places where materials are most abundant, and requiring five 

 or six weeks where these are more scanty. It is placed in 

 the fork of a small mossy tree, or among the thick twigs of 

 a shrub, often of a hawthorn, and sometimes of an evergreen ; 

 but it is seldom more than three or four feet from the 

 ground, and generally, if not always, more or less within the 

 cover of the sprays. In form, it is an elongated spheroid, or 

 rather that of an egg placed on the larger end ; and in ap- 

 pearance and texture it is very like a short decayed stump 

 which has become coated over with lichens, and it is as firm 

 in texture as it is neat and regular in form. The main fabric 

 is closely made of moss, taken in very small pieces, and 

 matted together with animal fibre, rarely with wool (as the 

 bird does not range so far from the bushes as to be much of 

 a wool-gatherer), but principally with what may be called 

 tree or bark silk ; that is, not the threads of spiders, either 

 those that are spun for snares or as gossamer to waft the 

 spinners through the air, for the last of these hardly stand a 

 shower, and the first disappear during the winter ; but the 

 silken cocoons, indiscriminately, perhaps, of the crysalides of 

 insects and the eggs of spiders, both of which are much less 

 perishable, and consequently much more abundant in the 

 early part of the season, when the birds build. 



These materials are firmly interwoven. But, though the 

 term is sometimes applied, they are not felted, as they are 

 not of a feltable nature, even though the birds could perform 

 that operation ; and as it is an operation which no bird can 

 perform, the name ought never to be used in describing the 

 texture of nests. The two materials form a stronger fabric 



