302 British Cage Birds. 



witb. rufous and black alternately. The throat is palish yellow, 

 and the breast whitish grey, slightly tinged with red. The 

 belly and sides are dusky red, crossed with transverse brown 

 lines. The tail is russet brown, striped with black bars. The 

 legs are palish brown. 



Habits and Breeding. — The Common Wren is indigenous 

 to Great Britain ; it is also an inhabitant of all wooded and 

 mountainous parts of Europe, and some parts of Asia. It 

 is not migratory. It is one of the smallest of British 

 birds. It is docile and sociable in disposition, and frequents 

 detached houses and farmsteads, searching for the flies and 

 insects found about the excrement of animals. 



In the selection of a nesting-place, the Common Wren 

 frequently chooses extraordinary and improbable places. An 

 instance is known of one of these birds having built its 

 nest inside a pump, in the box through which the piston 

 worked, its only means of ingress and egress being the space 

 allotted to the handle working the piston rod. Although the 

 pump was in daily use, and the piston worked up and down 

 through the nest several times a day during the process of 

 incubation, neither the mother nor her progeny appear to have 

 been alarmed, as the young birds were successfully reared and 

 fledged without molestation, except from a gardener who used 

 the pump, and who had the curiosity to take off the top to 

 see the nest and its contents. In another instance, a pair of 

 these birds chose, as a nesting-place, the inside of a postal 

 pillar box in a country district. The outside flap, covering 

 the aperture, having got broken off, permitted of the birds 

 getting ready access to the box, and they reared a brood 

 there successfully, a fact known to few people besides the 

 rural postman. 



Common Wrens frequently build their nests beneath the 

 eaves of cart sheds, in holes in walls, or in trees. A favourite 

 place is the branch of a tree overhanging a running stream ; 

 and another, a ruin, where the rents in the walls are barely 

 discernible by reason of the weeds of various kinds growing 

 over them. Again, they build in the eaves of thatched build- 

 ings, but more commonly in woods, in the stump of a tree, in 

 a bush among the underwood, on rare occasions on the 

 ground, and very often in hedges. 



The nest is egg-shaped, and generally of prodigious dimen- 



