70 WARBLER. 



nest is composed of moss, with a little wool, and is frequently, but 

 not always, open at top, the bird accommodating herself to the 

 situation in which it is placed ; frequently in an oak tree as above 

 mentioned, and often in a pear, or other fruit tree, against a garden 

 wall, in the midst of an ivy bush, and in many instances, in a fork 

 beneath a thick branch of a fir tree ; the eggs from seven to ten in 

 number, of a brownish white, darker at the larger end, and each 

 weighing nine or ten grains.* 



In respect to the last mode of building, I have witnessed three or 

 four instances; one in particular in a fir tree near Bexley, in Kent, 

 the 20th of April, 1791 ; the nest made of fine green moss, and lined 

 with feathers, somewhat as in the Chaffinch, but much contracted at 

 top; it was suspended beneath the forks of a tree,f and as it were tied 

 with strings in three or four places, and contained nine eggs. 



The places, which this bird is found in, need not be specified, as 

 it is every where known on the Old Continent, from Norway to the 

 Cape of Good Hope. It has a slight, weak note, more so than the 

 Common AYren, yet may be called melodious, and I was informed 

 by Mr. Pennant, that one of these, kept in a cage in Angermania, 

 sang very prettily. It is a very tame and familiar species. The late 

 Mr. Tunstall related to me a circumstance of one which had built in 

 a spruce fir in his garden, at Wyeliflfe, in Yorkshire, and permitted 

 the young to be handled several times, without the parents resenting 



the intrusion 4 



We learn, too, that this bird inhabits America, being met with 

 at New York, and among the red cedars, also throughout Pennsyl- 



* Supposing the egg to weigh 10 grains, and the bird 80, when the female has laid ten 

 eggs which it sometimes does, that is, one every day, it lays its own weight in ten da3's. 



f Mr. Pennant mentions a nest of one, suspended in like manner by the corners, to the 

 boughs of a Spruce Fir, and that the materials were, moss, worsted, and birch bark, lined 

 with hair and feathers. — Tour in Scotland, 1769, p. 118. I was once shewn a nest by the 

 late Mr. Lewin, in which several lengths of sewing silk were mixed with the other materials. 



J In the Ornithological Dictionary Introdnc. p. xxxiii. may be read some curious ex- 

 periments relating to the extreme gentleness of this species. 



