64 Summer Studies of Birds and Books chap. 



and orchards to the Spotted Flycatchers who are 

 following him from the Continent, and makes north 

 and west for wooded hills and dales. And this is not 

 because he is persecuted, or likely to be, for his nest 

 is not easy to find, nor yet easy to plunder when 

 found ; but simply because one of those predilections 

 for which we can never entirely account urges him 

 towards sunny timbered slopes where the trees are 

 old and offer him a choice of many a cavernous 

 homestead. Prom the Lake Country we have ex- 

 cellent accounts of liim in the well-known books of 

 the Eev. H. A. Macpherson ; but perhaps his favourite 

 homes are the central hills of Wales. Even here, 

 however, he is somewhat capricious ; while in Brecon- 

 shire and Eadnorshire he is quite a common bird, I 

 have never once found him in the Glamorganshire 

 hills, which I have known almost all my life. On 

 the Continent I have always seen him in just such 

 places as he loves in Wales, among the larger timber 

 of a Swiss mountain-side, or on the forest slopes of 

 the Taunus range.-^ Just as the trout loves swiftly- 

 running streams, or as the Wood-wren is sure to be 

 heard where the oak is the prevailing tree, so there 

 are certain spots which you instinctively feel that 



^ Once or twice I have seen it in the garden of a hotel in 

 Switzerland, and once nesting in a tree on the outskirts of Inter- 

 laken. For the distribution of this bird in Wales see Zoologist for 

 November 1893. It is singular that we hear so little of it from 

 the border counties. 



