GRASSHOPPER WARBLER. 
33 
This is the " Grasshopper Lark " of Gilbert White 
" which " — he writes ^ — " began his sibilous note in my 
fields last Saturday. Nothing can be more amusing than 
the whisper of this little bird, which seems to be close by, 
though at a hundred yards' distance ; and when close at 
your ear, is scarce louder than when a great way off. Had 
I not been a little acquainted with insects, and known 
that the grasshopper kind is not yet hatched, I should 
have hardly believed but that it had been a Locusta 
whispering in the bushes. The country people laugh 
when you tell them that it is the note of a bird. It is 
a most artful creature, skulking in the thickest part of 
a bush ; and will sing at a yard's distance, provided it be 
concealed. I was obliged to get a person to go on the 
other side of the hedge where it haunted ; and then it 
would run, creeping like a mouse, before us for a hundred 
yards together, through the bottom of the thorns ; yet 
it would not come into fair sight ; but in a morning early, 
and when undisturbed, it sings on the top of a twig, 
gaping and shivering with its wings." 
White also notes 2 that it " chirps all night in the height 
of summer." 
Kelsall once heard a very weird duet between this bird 
and the nightjar at Stoney Cross, in the New Forest, about 
eleven o'clock at night at mid-summer. 
There is a Hampshire nest of this species in the British 
Museum. 
Bury records ^ an unusual situation for its nest, " one 
with four eggs was taken on June 12th, 1844, half way 
down the Culver Cliff, in the Isle of Wight, and was com- 
^ Letter xvi. to Pennant. Selborne. April i8th, 1768. 
^ Letter xl. to Pennant. Selborne. September 2nd, 1774. 
3 " Notes on the Birds of the Isle of Wight." " Zoologist." 1844. 
