124 
NATURAL HISTORY 
August they bring tlieir broods into gardens and orcliards 
and make great bavoc among the summer fruits/ 
The blackcap 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 birds 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 than others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall 
tree in a village, the cock sings from morning to night; 
he affects neighbourhoods, and avoids solitude, and loves to 
build in orchards and about houses ; with us he perches on 
the vane of a tall may-pole. 
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 
^ The Hon. and Rev. W. Herbert thought the whole of this passage 
founded in error, since according to his experience there are no birds 
less shy and less pugnacious than whitethroats. And the late Mr. Daniel 
remarked on this passage that " so far from being wild and shy in the 
breeding season, the whitethroat frequents at that period the vicmity of 
London, and forms part even of the Fauna of St. Marylebone, covered 
as that parish now is with buildings. 1 have a nest taken by myself 
from a bramble-bush, by the side of a foot-path, just beyond the houses 
in the Avenue Road, Regent's Park." The fact is, Gilbert White seems 
to have mistaken the lesser whitethroat for the common whitethroat. 
The account which he gives of the habits of his bird will apply to the 
former, but not ro weU to the latter species. — Ed. 
The spotted flycatcher not unfrequently rears a second brood. — Ed. 
