SONG THRUSH 
the bird begins to sit, and four or five is the usual 
number. They are deep, clear blue, dotted and 
speckled with black, which sometimes becomes 
brown, or even crimson, applied in large, bold 
blotches. They are not very uncommonly pure 
blue and spotless, and like many eggs of the thrush 
and crow tribes, often have the markings reversed 
and heaviest at the smaller end. When one egg 
out of four or five is very different in size or 
markings from all the rest, whether the nest is a 
Thrush's or any other bird's, it is my own experi- 
ence that the peculiar egg is usually the first to 
be laid — not, as is generally said, the last. The 
Thrush is an indefatigable devourer of snails, worms, 
and other garden pests, and as a fruit-eater in 
summer he is much less of an offender than the 
Blackbird, doing indeed but slight total harm. His 
habit is well-known of carrying his snails to some 
chosen stone to crush them open upon it, and this 
" anvil " of his is often to be found surrounded 
by the sticky fragments of the shells. The Thrush 
is one of the first birds to suffer from hard 
weather ; after the great frost of 1895, for instance, 
it was in some of its favourite haunts, instead of 
the commonest bird, almost one of the scarcest for 
the first few months of the breeding season. 
