172 
THE NATURAL HISTORY 
[LETT, 
gardens and orchards, and make great havoc among the summer 
fruits. 
The bhackcap has in common a full, sweet, deep, loud, and 
wild pipe ; yet that strain is of short continuance, and his 
motions are desultory ; but when that bird sits calmly and 
engages in song in earnest, he pours forth very sweet, but 
inward melody, and expresses great variety of soft and gentle 
modulations, superior perhaps to those of any of our warblers, 
the nightingale excepted. Blackcaps mostly haunt orchards 
and gardens ; while they warble, their throats are wonderfully 
distended. 
The song of the redstart is superior, though somewhat like 
that of the whitethroat : some birds have a few more notes 
WHITETHROAT H 
than others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall tree in 
a village, the cock sings from morning till night : he affects 
neighbourhoods, and avoids solicude, and loves to build in 
orchards and about houses ; with us he perches on the vane 
of a tall maypole. 
The flycatcher is of all our summer birds the most mute and 
the most familiar ; it also appears the last of any. It builds in 
a vine, or a sweetbriar, against the wall of a house, or in the 
hole of a wall, or on the end of a beam or plate, and often close 
to the post of a door where people are going in and out all day 
long. This bird does not make the least pretension to song, but 
uses a little inward wailing note when it thinks its young in 
danger from cats or other annoyances : it breeds but once, and 
retires early. 
Selborne parisli alone can and h.is exhibited at times n]ore 
than half the birds that are ever seen in all Sweden ; the former 
has produced more than one hundred and twenty species, the 
