2484 Birds. 



a hundred yards from it that summer. The same parts are chosen 

 by them annually. Small parties touch here on their autumnal pas- 

 sage. They commence their nest about May 15 ; it is composed of 

 dried grasses, lined occasionally with a few patches of hair. They 

 are very pretty denizens of the pastoral parts. 



Grasshopper Warbler (Sylvia locuslella). Rare, but met with in 

 the least frequented and wildest parts. 



Sedge Warbler (Sylvia salicaria). Reach us often in a very ex- 

 hausted state. In 1843 I noticed a pair fluttering about in a grass- 

 field, so fatigued with their journey that I nearly picked them up 

 with my hand. In May, 1845, one was picked up dead, having 

 flown against a window in the night, and could not recover itself. 

 They arrive in small parties of from two to five or six birds at once. 

 I once took a nest curiously enwoven of gardeners' matting, which is 

 sometimes left on the banks of the Trent by floods. The young 

 birds may be seen about June clinging to and fluttering about the 

 reeds and sedge, and keep sometimes with the parents after leaving 

 the nest. 



Reed Warbler (Sylvia arundinacea). A few pairs come annually 

 to breed in the small reed-beds which skirt the outlets of the Trent, 

 and visit the same parts annually. There is a particular bed in which 

 a pair has bred for fifteen years. Nest contains eggs about June 

 20, sometimes by the 14th, and is built in the thickest part of the 

 reeds, which afford the best concealment. I have found it suspended 

 between four, frTe and six reeds. One season floods came and 

 spoiled the nest three times, but the birds persevered and built a 

 fourth. The nests of birds of the first and second years have not the 

 finished neatness of those which are built at a more advanced age. 

 Sitting aslant on a dead reed the birds pour forth their hurried song 

 with great rapidity, seldom hushing it for any length of time during 

 the twenty-four hours. A pair killed, May 30, 1848. 



Nightingale (Sylvia luscinia). The nightingale visits us every 

 spring, coming to a large wood of 500 acres on the outskirts of the 

 parish ; but 1 have never known more than one bird killed here. On 

 May 4, 1848, a person brought to me a little bird which he had shot 

 off a furze-bush on Stanton Hiles, a rough uncultivated piece of 

 ground covered with bushes. He told me that " he had got a bird 

 like a big sparrow, which he was sure when alive would have beat all 

 England for a bit of music," and forthwith lugged from his capa- 

 cious velveteen the creature that was to astonish me. I soon dis- 

 covered in its person a specimen of this " Jenny Lind " of songsters. 



