THE COMMON WREN. 347 



or in trees and shrubs of various kinds. Warmer sites are not 

 unfrequently selected ; once in a corn-stack, and four times within 

 houses at our country place, nests of the wren were observed. One 

 was placed on the wall-top, just under the roof of a coach-house. 

 A swallow's nest of the preceding year, built inside a shed and 

 against a rafter supporting a floor, was taken possession of by 

 another pair, and fitted up with moss, a considerable quantity of 

 which was introduced, though no attempt at a dome was made ; 

 indeed, for a proper construction of the kind there would not 

 have been sufficient room. Nor did the third nest present any 

 appearance of a dome ; it was built in the hole of a wall inside a 

 house, the only entrance being through a broken pane of the 

 window. The fourth was constructed in a bunch of herbs hung- 

 up to a beam across the top of the garden-house for the purpose 

 of being dried ; almost the entire nest was formed of the herbs, 

 and the bunch altogether was very little larger than the nest itself; 

 the door of this house was generally kept locked, the only mode 

 of entrance at such times being beneath it, where there was barely 

 room for the birds to pass through : — in all these instances the 

 broods were reared in safety. About Whitehouse, on the shore 

 of Belfast bay, where the grass-wrack {Zostera marina) is abundant, 

 and always lying in masses on the beach, I am informed that 

 this material is commonly used by the wren in the construction 

 of its nest, which externally is entirely composed of it. An ob- 

 servant friend agrees with Mr. Hewitson, that the nest is most fre- 

 quently lined with some feathers, though not thickly. He has found 

 upwards of a dozen of eggs in one, and notices, from his own ob- 

 servation, the well-known circumstance of its making two or three 

 nests before laying : — fourteen eggs have been reckoned in nests, 

 by two of my correspondents.* A gentleman of my acquaintance 

 was once much amused by witnessing a wren purloining materials 

 from a thrush's nest, which was built in a bush adjoining its own 

 tenement, then in course of erection. When the thrush was ab- 



* Mr. Hewitson remarks : — " Notwithstanding the number of eggs which the wren 

 has been said to lay, I have never succeeded in finding more than eight, and rarely 

 more than seven, in the same nest." Eggs, Brit. Birds, p. 200. 



