272 BRITISH BIRDS. 



his clear dark eyes. If at that moment the idea enters his little head that 

 you are watching him, he vanishes with long hops as quick as lightning 

 under the bushes or between the vegetables, to reappear again in half a 

 minute with as much confiding trust as ever. Many a time I should have 

 been glad to add such a fine-plumaged bird to my cabinet, but could not 

 find it in my heart to injure a creature which was such charming company 

 and seemed to trust so confidingly to my protection.''' 



During the short summer in the northern regions the Arctic Blue- 

 throat is one of the commonest of birds, and in Sweden is known as the 

 Swedish Mocking-bird. Generally it is shy and retiring, seeking food in 

 the densest thickets and bushes, haunting the marshy grounds sprinkled 

 over with small spruce-fir, dwarf willows, and juniper. But when newly 

 arrived from its winter home, and beginning to sing, it comes more promi- 

 nently into notice and is far from shy. 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-vjhit of 

 the ChaflBnch. 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, descend- 

 ing 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 ting-ting, resembling the sound produced by striking a suspended 

 bar of steel with another piece of the same metal. The female appears 

 to shun the open far more carefully than her mate ; and while he will be 

 perched on a topmost spray, gladdening the whole air around with his 

 varied tuneful melody, she will remain in the undergrowth beneath him, 

 gliding hither and thither, more like a mouse than a bird, through the 

 branches. 



The Arctic Bluethroat is a bird of the swamps; if it does not 

 go to the far-off tundras beyond the limit of forest-growth to rear its 

 young, it selects some swampy part of the forest, or some boggy moor 

 where mosquitoes abound when it has to feed its nestlings. The fjelds of 



