THE YELLOW BUNTING. Log 
and marking, although most of them exhibit the purplish black characters which 
have earned for this bird the title of “Scribbling Lark.’ In tint they vary from 
greenish-white, through greyish-lavender, to pale rosy-brownish; whilst one egg, 
taken by my brother Frank, in Cornwall, was bright sienna-red, with a single 
irregular blackish line across one side, and somewhat resembles a rare form of the 
egg of the Tree Pipit (Plate III, fig. 100). On two occasions I have taken the 
greenish white egg almost or entirely without markings, the first time I only 
secured the first egg (as I had to return to town the following day) on the second 
occasion I obtained a clutch of three; four elliptical eggs in one clutch were dull 
greenish-white, one of them with only a few delicate hair-lines, a second with a 
single additional rectangular line across the lower third enclosing a second shorter 
club-shaped line, the two other eggs were fairly normal in marking; another nest 
of four is slightly tinted with lavender, the markings are mostly fine, and look 
like tangled silk, mixed with a few thicker streaks of purplish black, one of these 
eggs is almost a perfect sphere; other greenish eggs have extraordinary markings 
(like written notes in music, oriental letters, or the little men which children 
sometimes draw on their slates) intermixed with finer scrawlings and patches of 
lavender; the lavender tinted eggs chiefly differ in being clouded with a deeper 
shade of the same colour, often at the larger end; one egg which I obtained 
vaguely resembles that of a Chaffinch, being of the same size and with very few 
linear markings, only the diffused patches are greyish lavender, instead of looking 
like blood-stains. 
The number of eggs in a clutch varies from four to five, four being the 
commoner number; if less are obtained in an incubated condition, either the first 
nest has been destroyed before the completion of the clutch, or one or more eggs 
abstracted or broken accidentally. During incubation the hen bird sits very close; 
so that frequently you may almost tread upon the nest in stepping through tangled 
brushwood; then /ferrelup / that sound of hurried flight familiar to the birds-nester, 
makes you suddenly look to catch a glimpse of the startled bird rounding a bush, 
or passing over a hedge; and in a minute you are crouching down and turning 
aside the foliage to look at its treasures: often when searching among brambles 
and hawthorn have I felt my hand brushed by the wing of this bird as it has 
started from its nest. 
I am satisfied that three, if not four, broods are reared in a year: the male 
is said, on good authority, to assist the female in incubation, but in every instance 
in which I have flushed the bird from the nest, it has invariably been the hen; 
indeed the male has always been singing somewhere close by. It is well-known 
that the hens of many species as they grow old assume a plumage closely resemb- 
VoL, IL T 
