124 NATURAL HISTORY 



August they bring their broods into gardens and orchards 

 and make great havoc among the summer fruits. 1 



The blackcap has, in common, a full, sweet, deep, loud, 

 and wild pipe ; yet that strain is of short continuance, and 

 his motions are desultory ; but when that birds sits calmly 

 and engages in song in earnest, he pours forth very sweet, 

 but inward melody, and expresses great variety of soft and 

 gentle modulations, superior perhaps to those of any of our 

 warblers, the nightingale excepted. 



Blackcaps mostly haunt orchards and gardens : while they 

 warble, their throats are wonderfully distended. 



The song of the redstart is superior, though somewhat 

 like that of the whitethroat ; some birds have a ew more 

 notes than others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall 

 tree in a village, the cock sings from morning to night; 

 he affects neighbourhoods, and avoids solitude, and loves to 

 build in orchards and about houses ; with us he perches on 

 the vane of a tall may-pole. 



The flycatcher is* of all our summer birds the most mute 

 and the most familiar; it also appears the last of any. It 

 builds in a vine, or a sweetbriar, against the wall of a house, 

 or in the hole of a wall, or on the end of a beam or plate, 

 and often close to the post of a door where people are going 

 in and out all day long. This bird does not make the least 

 pretension to song, but uses a little inward wailing note 

 when it thinks its young in danger from cats or other 

 annoyances ; it breeds but once, and retires early. 2 



1 The Hon. and Rev. W. Herbert thought the whole of this passage 

 founded in error, since according to his experience there are no birds 

 less shy and less pugnacious than whitethroats. And the late Mr. Daniel 

 remarked on this passage that " so far from being wild and shy in the 

 breeding season, the whitethroat frequents at that period the vicinity of 

 London, and forms part even of the Fauna of St. Marylebone, covered 

 as that parish now is with buildings. I have a nest taken by myself 

 from a bramble-bush, by the side of a foot-path, just beyond the houses 

 in the Avenue Road, Regent's Park." The fact is, Gilbert White seems 

 to have mistaken the lesser whitethroat for the common whitethroat. 

 The account which he gives of the habits of his bird will apply to the 

 former, but not so well to the latter species. ED. 



The spotted flycatcher not unfrequently rears a second brood. ED. 



