KEDSTARTS. 37 



telegraph-'wires, and doubtless in most gardens. The Redstart 

 is so extremely beautiful in summer, his song so tender and 

 sweet, and all his ways so gentle and trustful, that if he 

 were as common, and stayed with us all the year, he 

 would certainly put our Robin's popularity to the proof. 

 Nesting in our garden, or even on the very wall of our house, 

 and making his presence there obvious by his brilliant colouring 

 and his fearless domesticity, he might become, like his plainer 

 cousin of the continent, the favourite of the peasant, who looks 

 to his arrival in spring as the sign of a better time approaching- 

 'I hardly hoped,' writes an old Oberland guide to me, after 

 an illness in the winter, ' to see the flowers again, or hear the 

 little Rothel (Black Redstart) under my eaves.' 



The Oxford Redstarts find convenient holes for their nests 

 in the pollard willows which line the banks of the Cherwell 

 and the many arms of the Isis. The same unvaried and un- 

 natural form of tree, which looks so dreary and ghastly in the 

 waste of winter flood, is fuU of comfort and adaptability for 

 the birds in summer. The works of man, though not always 

 beautiful, are almost always turned to account by the birds, 

 and by many kinds preferred to the solitude of wilder haunts. 

 Whether he builds houses, or constructs railways, or digs 

 ditches, or forces trees into an unnatural shape, they are ready 

 to take advantage of every chance he gives them. Only when 

 the air is poisoned by smoke and drainage, and vegetation 

 retreats before the approach of slums, do they leave their natural 

 friends to live without the charm of their voices — all but that 

 strange parasite of mankind, the Sparrow. He, growing sootier 



