The Red-Spotted Bluethroat. 49 



the eye ; the cheeks, chin, throat and gorget glossy cobalt blue, centred with 

 chestnut, bordered with black, and then on the chest again bounded by a belt of 

 chestnut ; remainder of under parts huffish white ; the wing coverts and axillaries 

 yellower; bill black, feet brown, iris brown. 



The female is much duller, showing none of the blue or chestnut colouring 

 of the male until old, when she sometimes more nearly resembles him in hues ; 

 the band across her chest is dark brown. 



In the autumn much of the bright colouring is lost, the new feathers being 

 broadly fringed with grey, but in the spring this bordering disappears. 



Young males resemble the female ; but nestlings are streaked with blackish, 

 and, excepting in the chestnut base to the tail, are not unlike young Robins. 



In its habits this species much resembles the Redbreast ; in Heligoland it is 

 said to frequent potato-fields in the autumn, but in the spring to haunt the 

 gooseberry and currant-bushes in gardens, or beds planted thickly with cabbages, 

 just beginning to throw out fresh sprouts. In the north however it is essentially 

 a marsh-loving bird. 



The Rev. H. H. Slater in his "Field notes in Norway" (Zoologist 1883) 

 says of the Bluethroat : — " Very plentiful on the Dovre Fjeld. At Fokstuen I 

 might have shot twenty males any day, but the females were great skulkers, and 

 seldom showed themselves. The note of this bird is remarkably varied, but may 

 be recognized by the metallic ' ting ting ' with which it usually commences its 

 warble, which is just like a couple of strokes on a small high-toned triangle. It 

 also has a peculiar hurried way of singing, as if it were anxious to get to the 

 end of its song as soon as possible. At Hjerkiem it was very common also, both 

 in the birch scrub and even in the dwarf willow and juniper scrub above the 

 birch limit on the fells. I found a nest here with eight eggs, and sat down by 

 it to blow one of them. The old birds at once came up and hovered angrily 

 round me, often within a yard of me, though the eggs were not at all incubated, 

 the female also quite forgetting her usual anxiety for concealment. Not only 

 they, but every other Bluethroat within hearing of this excited couple, hurried up 

 also, until I must have had about a dozen scolding within ten yards of me at 

 once ; the moment I rose, however, they all vanished, like Roderick Dhu's 

 warriors, ' where they stood.' The nest was made of the finest grasses, and 

 placed in an open space in the birch wood, under a branch of trailing juniper." 



The Bluethroat being, as already noted, an inhabitant of marshy land, it 

 usually constructs its nest either in some chance cavity in the side of one of the 

 many mounds or hummocks which abound on the irregular fjelds of Lapland and 

 the tundras of Siberia, or in the more swampy parts of the forest. Naturally it 



Vol. I. K 



