378 BRITISH BIRDS. 



. . . The nest perfectly resembles that of the Grasshopper Warbler*, but 

 is closer built, and its colour is darker and greyer; it is also more 

 smoothly finished outside. It is as deep as the nests of other Reed- 

 Warblers, neatly rounded, with the upper edge bent inwards. The 

 materials are principally dry leaves and stalks of fine grass, mixed with 

 grass and the fibres of nettles and other plants, and often with insect- 

 webs, all somewhat carefully woven together, in some places almost felted 

 together. Inside it is lined with very fine grass and a considerable quantity 

 of horsehair." 



The two nests from Taunton were suspended between stems of the 

 meadow-sweet. They are composed almost entirely of fine round grass- 

 stalks mixed with a few dry grass-leaves and some kind of downy fibre. 

 One of them is somewhat sparingly lined with black horsehair ; and the 

 other is lined with a spray or two of green moss, upon which a profuse 

 covering of black horsehair is placed, coming up to the outside rim. The 

 inside is beautifully rounded and deep, the inside diameter being about 

 21 inches and the depth If inches. 



The Marsh- Warbler breeds only once in the year ; but if the nest 

 be disturbed it soon makes another. Pralle told me that he once found 

 a nest of a Marsh-Warbler on an island in one of the parks near Hanover 

 containing fresh eggs, which he took. A week afterwards he revisited the 

 place, and found a second nest with eggs close by the old site. He also 

 took these eggs, and was surprised to find that in the course of another 

 week a third nest had been built, in which the birds successfully reared a 

 brood. 



The number of eggs varies from five to seven ; and in the colour and 

 character of the markings they present two very distinct types, the one 

 apparently as common as the other. The first type has the ground-colour 

 pale greenish blue, with surface-spots and blotches of olive-brown and 

 underlying markings of violet-grey. The peculiarity of this type is that 

 most of the spots are underlying ones, the overlying spots being fewer and 

 smaller. Each of these olive surface-markings generally contains a spot 

 of darker brown in the centre. The second type somewhat more nearly 

 approaches the eggs of the Reed-Warbler, being of a greenish- white ground- 

 colour, richly marbled, blotched, and spotted with olive-brown, and having 

 a few very dark brown specks. In this type the underlying markings are 

 few and usually small. In both types most of the markings are distributed 



* Dresser, in his ' Birds of Europe,' also notices tlie resemblance of tlie nest to that of 

 the Grasshopper Warbler : but the paragraph in which the remark occurs is so obviously 

 a free translation of Naumann that it cannot be regarded as independent evidence. I have 

 not seen many nests of either of these birds ; but in all that I have seen, the nest of 

 the Acrocephalus is built of round grass, and the nest of the LocusteJla of fiat grass. 



