SPOTTED FLYCATCHER. levies 
visitors. White of Selborne remarks, even more than 
once, in his miscellaneous observations published in the 
second volume of Mr. Jesse’s Gleanings, that the Spotted 
Flycatcher arrives on the 20th of May. Mr. Selby says, 
this bird seldom makes its appearance till the oak-leaf 
is partly expanded, and it begins to form a nest immedi- 
ately on its arrival. It frequents orchards, gardens, lawns 
and pleasure-grounds, and is not a little remarkable for 
the singularity of the places in which it sometimes makes 
its nest. It is also believed that the same pair of birds 
return to occupy the same spot for several years in suc- 
cession. 
In the first volume of the Magazine of Natural History, 
a notice appears of a pair of Flycatchers that formed their 
nest on the head of a garden-rake left by accident near 
a cottage. Mr. Blackwall has mentioned an instance of 
a pair that built their nest in a bird-cage, which had been 
left with the door open suspended from the branch of a 
tree in a garden. Mr. Atkinson, m his Compendium of 
Ornithology, says, we recollect a pair having built on the 
angle of a lamp-post in one of the streets of Leeds, and 
there rearing their young. Mr. Jesse, in the second part 
of his Gleanings, mentions a nest of this Flycatcher, which 
was found on the top of a lamp near Portland-place in 
London, having five eggs in it, which had been sat upon. 
This nest, fixed in the ornamental crown on the top of 
the lamp, as described, I saw at the Office of Woods and 
Forests, in Whitehall-place. 
The more usual places for this bird’s nest are, the side 
of a faggot-stack, a hole in a wall, or on a beam in an 
out-building, whence arises one of its provincial names, 
that of Beam-bird ; it also frequently fixes its nest on 
a branch of a pear-tree, a vine, or a honeysuckle, when 
