54 BRITISH BIRDS WITH THEIR NESTS AND EGGS. 
The male bird has the upper part of the head to below the eye and backward 
to the nape, as well as the chin, glossy blue-black; the mantle and back bluish 
ash-grey; the rump white; the larger wing-coverts black, broadly tipped with 
white; flights and tail black, but the primaries somewhat ashy on the inner webs 
and the second to the fifth with narrow whitish margins to the emarginate portions; 
the outer web of the innermost secondary largely suffused with red: the sides of 
the face, neck, and under surface bright salmon-red, the vent and under tail-coverts 
white; beak black; feet dark brown, changing to flesh colour in confinement ; iris 
brown. The female is slightly duller in colouring on the upper parts, and the 
whole of the red is replaced by soft Dove-brown. The young most nearly resemble 
the female, but have no black on the head, and a sordid white wing-bar. 
It is well known that feeding entirely on hemp in confinement has the effect 
of rendering the plumage black, just as that of the Canary is altered to orange- 
vermilion by extensive cayenne feeding: to call black Bullfinches rare feathered 
varieties (as is sometimes done at bird-shows) is therefore absurd: as a matter of 
fact they are merely internally stained. 
During the summer months the Bullfinch chiefly haunts the outskirts of woods, 
plantations, dense shrubberies, private pleasure grounds, where clumps of conifers 
with tangled undergrowth of brambles have been left, to vary the landscape or to 
form cover for game, or clearings covered with two or three years growth; less 
frequently lanes skirted by tall hedges; but never far from woods. In such places 
it builds its shallow nest, and once I found one in a loose wayside hazel-hedge, 
about three feet high and quite at the top, barely concealed by a leaf. 
The favourite site for the nest is on the upper surface of a horizontal branch 
of a spruce-fir, or yew; but I have also met with it in dwarf hawthorns tangled 
with blackberry vines, and in the side of a hawthorn, half buried by elm-foliage, 
on the edge of a wood: sometimes a small box-tree is selected, or very rarely a 
slight gap in a tall hedge. The outer framework of the nest consists of a tangled 
platform of slender twigs or roots, surrounding a neat, and sometimes stoutly built, 
but usually somewhat frail looking cup of plaited rootlets and bents, with a lining 
of root-fibre and black horse-hairs. According to Seebohm “in some nests a little 
wool or a feather or two are found,” but I never found either, though occasionally 
a dead leaf drifts into the cup and is left there. The eggs number from four to 
six, but rarely exceed five; in colour they are pale blue, sometimes almost white; 
spotted with blackish brown, mixed with spots or blotches of purplish, red-brown, 
and now and then lavender; most eggs are chiefly spotted at or near the larger 
end; sometimes there are one or two Bunting markings among the spots; rarely 
the zone of markings occurs near the smaller end of the egg; and lastly, in the 
