50 



British Birds, with their Nests and Eggs. 



is not easily discovered, unless by chance the incubating female is flushed from 

 her eggs. 



The nest itself is of loose construction, fashioned somewhat like that of the 

 Robin, the materials used being mostly dried grass and rootlets, the cup being 

 neatly lined with hair: the five to eight eggs have a greenish ground tint and 

 are finely speckled and marbled with rufous-brown. 



The food of this bird consists of small worms, centipedes, spiders, insects and 

 their larvae and small seeds of weeds ; the young are fed very largely upon mos- 

 quitoes, which the parents capture on the wing, after the manner of Flycatchers. 



Seebohm gives the following full account of its song : — " On its first arrival 

 it often warbles in an undertone so low, that you fancy the sound must be 

 muffled by the thick tangle of branches in which you think the bird is concealed, 

 whilst all the time he is perched on high upon the topmost spray of a young fir, 

 his very conspicuousness causing him to escape detection for the moment. His 

 first attempts at singing are harsh and grating, like the notes of the Sedge-Warbler, 

 or the still harsher ones of the Whitethroat ; these are followed by several 

 variations in a louder and rather more melodious tone, repeated over and over 

 again, somewhat in the fashion of a Song- Thrush. After this you might fancy 

 the little songster was trying to mimic the various alarm-notes of all the birds he 

 can remember ; the chiz-zit of the Wagtail, the tip-tip-tip of the Blackbird, and 

 especially the whit-whit of the Chaffinch. As he improves in voice, he sings 

 louder and longer, until at last he almost approaches the Nightingale in the 

 richness of the melody that he pours forth. Sometimes he will sing as he flies 

 upwards, descending with expanded wings and tail to alight on the highest bough 

 of some low tree, almost exactly as the Tree- Pipit does in the meadows of our 

 own land. When the females have arrived there comes at the end of his song 

 the most metallic notes I have ever heard a bird utter. It is a sort of tino--tin'y. 

 resembling the sound produced by striking a suspended bar of steel with another 

 piece of the same metal." 



It is curious that the Rev. H. H. Slater should have stated that the Blue- 

 throat "commences'''' its song with the same metallic ting-ting; because, judging 

 from the few birds I have kept which uttered metallic sounds, I should have 

 expected the latter, and not Seebohm's version, to be the case. 



Gatke in his " Birds of Heligoland " observes : — " One would hardly believe that 

 the home of so lovely a creature as the Bluethroat extended so far north as the 

 coast of the Polar Sea, particularly as its beautiful azure blue and rusty orange dress 

 gives one the impression of its being a native of tropical latitudes. As a matter 

 of fact, its life is divided between its Arctic nesting stations and its winter quarters, 



