﻿Beneficial to Agriculture. 33 



common in the southern counties of Scotland, and locally rare in 

 Ireland. 



Although this bird frequents shrubberies and gardens, especially 

 on its return journey in the autumn, its chief haunts are thickets 

 and plantations with a dense undergrowth, where its sweet and 

 melodious song may be heard while the bird remains concealed 

 from view, hidden by the entangled vegetation. 



Its nest is frequently placed in bramble bushes and other 

 coarse growth, also in gooseberry and currant bushes in gardens. 

 It is formed of dried grass and roots externally, with a neat lining 

 of hair and fine roots. The eggs number four or five ; they are 

 creamy-white or occasionally bluish-white, blotched and spotted 

 with different shades of buffish, brown, and purplish-grey. 



The food of the Garden Warbler and its young consists chiefly 

 of insects, and to a large extent of noxious kinds, such as aphides 

 (green fly) and the larvse of the Small Cabbage White butterfly 

 (Pieris rapse), but those of the Large White (P. brassicse) are not 

 eaten by this bird, and probably by very few others, if any. It is 

 during the autumn that this warbler spends much time searching 

 for aphides among the foliage of trees and bushes in gardens and 

 orchards, where it renders great service to the fruit-grower and 

 gardener in destroying immense numbers of these troublesome 

 pests. The amount of good done, therefore, is far in excess of the 

 harm caused by the small quantity of currants with which this 

 bird varies its diet. The whole of the upper parts are olive-brown, 

 eye-streak paler ; primary feathers darker brown, narrowly 

 margined with pale buffish ; under-parts buffish-white, duller on 

 the flanks ; legs and feet leaden -grey ; bill brown. The female is 

 slightly paler than the male. 



WILLOW- WAKBLEE. (PI. XVI.) 

 Phylloscopus trochilus. 



The Willow Warbler, also called the Willow Wren, is very 

 abundant and generally distributed over Great Britain ; in Wales 

 and the extreme south-west and also in Ireland it is locally 

 common, and it is only an occasional visitor to the northern islands 

 of Scotland. 



This little migrant reaches the southern counties of England 



